{"id":24175,"date":"2019-01-24T12:34:54","date_gmt":"2019-01-24T18:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=24175"},"modified":"2019-12-28T11:04:36","modified_gmt":"2019-12-28T17:04:36","slug":"book-report-mary-cassatt-oils-and-pastels-by-e-john-bullard-1976","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/24\/book-report-mary-cassatt-oils-and-pastels-by-e-john-bullard-1976\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Mary Cassatt: Oils and Pastels<\/i> by E. John Bullard (1976)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/marycassattoilsandpastels.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">This is the second of the two books I bought about Cassatt <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/21\/good-book-and-album-hunting-october-20-2018-the-friends-of-the-springfield-greene-county-library-book-sale\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last fall<\/a> (the other was entitled simply <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/23\/book-report-mary-cassatt-by-sophia-craze-1990-2003\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mary Cassatt<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the book has the standard art book template: A bit of bio in the beginning and full color plates of samples of Cassatt&#8217;s work along with a couple paragraphs of text about each.  It&#8217;s pleasant to revisit the works that I have most likely seen recently.<\/p>\n<p>More importantly, or more notably, a couple bits from her biography stick out from this book, whether because it appears in this book and not the other I read or because I&#8217;ve new connections in knowledge that make the things stick out:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The book plays up the relationship between Degas and Cassatt, wondering whether they had some romance that was stifled because her father did not like Degas.<\/li>\n<li>I mentioned in my book report on <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/01\/book-report-sargent-by-clare-gibson-1997\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">[John Singer] Sargent<\/a> that he and Cassatt were contemporaries; this book says he got her a portrait commission on one of her trips to the United States (remember, gentle reader, this &#8220;middle class&#8221; young lady traveled and settled in Europe).<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ll quote the book directly:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>Cassatt completely rejected Matisse&#8217;s work.  In a letter to Louisine Havemeyer in March 1913, she exclaimed, &#8220;If you could see his early work! Such a commonplace vision, such weak execution, he was intelligent enough to see he could never achieve fame, so shut himself up for years and evolved this and has achieved notoriety&#8230;. It is not alone in polities that anarchy reigns, it saddens me, of course it is in a certain measure our set [the Independents] which has made this [freedom] possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I think the insertion of [freedom] instead of [excrement] is pro-Matisse commentary by this book&#8217;s author and not necessarily the intent of Cassatt.  But I agree with her assessment (see also my report on the monograph <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/04\/book-report-matisse-by-volkmar-essers-1989-2002\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Matisse<\/a><\/em>.  With this, though, Cassatt moves easily into a second-place tie with Manet in my list of favorite Impressionists.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Worth a browse, certainly, and worth the couple of bucks I paid for it at the autumn Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale.<\/p>\n<p>Side note: Interestingly, Cassatt, the nineteenth century artist died in 1926, just three years before <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/23\/on-the-iron-mask\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Iron Mask<\/em><\/a> was released.  They seem of two completely different eras, but history is ultimately seamless.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the second of the two books I bought about Cassatt last fall (the other was entitled simply Mary Cassatt). Of course, the book has the standard art book template: A bit of bio in the beginning and full color plates of samples of Cassatt&#8217;s work along with a couple paragraphs of text about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24175"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25436,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24175\/revisions\/25436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}