Mary Stevenson Cassatt is one of America’s most well known artists. She was born in Alleghany City near Pittsburgh. Her father was a banker and stockbroker. The family traveled frequently to Europe, where he took her first art classes and also learned to speak French and German. After seeing the great art of Europe, she decided she wanted to be an artist. When the family settled in Philadelphia in 1859, she began classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Discouraged with the patronizing teachers and male students, she left the Academy in 1865 saying, “There is no teaching at the Academy.” She was referring to the fact that female students were allowed to learn anatomy from plaster casts only, not from life. Famously opposed to Mary’s choice to pursue an artistic career her father said, “I would rather see her dead.” He finally relented in 1866, and Mary was allowed to go to Paris to study art, but with her mother and other family friends as chaperones. In Paris she had to take private lessons from Academy artists, because females were not allowed to be students in classes.

Cassatt’s first ten years in Paris were generally unsuccessful. She was juried into the 1868 Paris Salon exhibition, but her work was rejected for the next ten years. In 1871, she returned to America because of the Franco-Prussian War. A letter of July 1871 states: “I have given up my studio and torn up my father’s portrait and have not touched a brush for six weeks nor ever will again until I see some prospect of getting back to Europe.” The Archbishop of Pittsburgh commissioned Cassatt in 1871 to make copies of two Correggio paintings in Parma, Italy. The money and commission allowed her return to Italy and to travel to Spain. She returned to Paris in 1874, and found an apartment with her sister Lydia. ”No amount of bodily suffering would seem for me too great a price for the pleasure of being in a country where one could have some art advantages. I recognize who were my true masters. I admired Manet, Courbet and Degas. I hated conventional art. I began to live.”

Cassatt’s father, mother, brother and his wife and children moved to Paris in 1877, and she lived with them and enjoyed the closeness of her family until 1888. She remained unmarried; having decided marriage would not be good for her career. This trip to Paris was a success; her paintings were accepted into five Salon exhibitions. But she changed her style and decided not to submit again. She met the Impressionist painter Edgar Degas in 1878. “It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.” Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists: “I accepted with joy. I hated conventional art. I began to live. At last I could work in complete independence, without bothering about the eventual judgment of a jury.”

 

Woman with a Pearl Necklace depicts Cassatt’s sister Lydia in the newly opened Paris Opera. Cassatt is fully engaged in Impressionist style in this work. The crystals in the chandeliers provide the shimmering rainbow light source of Impressionism. Science had recently revealed that all sources of light were made up of the colors purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red as seen through a prism, and in the rainbow. There color spectrum contains no black or white. Cassatt paints colors of the lights and shadows creating the three-dimensional effect of Lydia’s skin, white gloves, and light pink dress with the six colors of the light spectrum. Note specifically the greens, blues and purples used to paint the shadows. To depict the slight shifting of movements of the sitter, Cassatt has employed the Impressionist‘s swift and light brush stokes.

In addition to the use of color and brush work, Cassatt also reflects the Impressionist interest in representing modern life. The Impressionist were a group of about ten artists, while their contemporaries, the thousands of Academy painter, still cling to the stilted subject matter of Greek goddesses and historical themes. The bourgeoisie of Paris were enjoying the new entertainments available to everyone: circuses, nightclubs on Montmartre, opera, and ballet. Cassatt’s compositions also were very well thought out. The viewer can follow the numerous small and large semi-circles from the small curves of dress and pillow in the foreground, through the sweeping curve of Lydia’s dress bodice, answering curves of her shoulders, small pearl necklace and larger swell of the red velvet of the chair in the center. The swinging curves of the boxes and the distant glass beads of the chandelier complete the scene. With all these compositional elements, Cassatt also adds the diagonal of Lydia’s fan, echoed by her arms and shoulders, to bring Lydia’s head to the center of the composition. Note also the placement of the red cushions and red flower in her corsage and in her hair. The most distinctly colored item is the fan. This color palette is used through out the painting, as the larger patches of blues, greens and purples depict the crowd of onlookers in the boxes. Mary Cassatt is a master of composition.

Cassatt exhibited with the Impressionist’s from 1879 to 1886. The 1879 exhibition was one of the Impressionist’s most successful. Another of Cassatt’s paintings in the 1879 exhibition was “Little Girl in the Blue Arm Chair” (1878) (35.2’’ x 5l.1’’) (NGA). Cassatt loved to paint her family, and she showed a particular skill for catching the unique and engaging moments of children in unposed situations. The little girl has casually plopped down in the chair. Tired and bored, she takes no notice that her skirt has ruched up around her waist revealing her lace petticoat. Her little brown dog, painted in blue, green and purple, sleeps in the opposite chair and mirrors the shape of her plaid skirt. Her arms are all akimbo, the left filling in the back of the chair, while the curve of the right arm is repeated by the curve of the distant sofa.

The composition is cleverly made up of repeated curves and angles. The plaid skirt determines the specific colors repeated throughout. Cassatt chooses to create an unusual overall composition that cuts the furniture off at the top, sides and bottom, evidencing the Impressionist’s recognition of the new art of photography. Snapshots inevitably centered the photo on the selected image and cut off any surrounding objects at the edges.

Degas suggested in 1880 that Cassatt should continue to develop the mother and child theme that was bringing her success and where she excelled. Cassatt also expanded her media to include pastels and prints. The popularity of Japanese woodcut prints (Ukiyo-e), introduced into Paris in 1867, were another major influence on the Impressionist’s and Cassatt. She began to make a series of prints in 1890, employing the techniques of aquatint, dry point, and soft ground etching. “Maternal Caress”  is one of ten prints her one-woman exhibition in 1891 at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. Prints use a limited palette that relies on the color of the paper and simple patterns in a single color of ink to depict figures and background. The color areas are accomplished with aquatint, and soft ground etching. Dry point employs a sharp needle that must draw lines into a hard metal plate. Mistakes are not correctable. Cassatt’s lines, drawn precisely to render the affection between mother and child, are perfection. She was able to make the process look easy, when in reality it is very difficult.

“Boating Party” (1893-1894) (3’ x 3.10’’) (NGA), is another example of Cassatt’s great skill with oil paint, composition, and mother and child images. Her later paintings no longer were made with quick brushstrokes except in the movement of water. Nevertheless, the six sunlight colors still create all the forms. Beyond the fun of the interaction between mother and child, the composition is created with numerous curved forms, the most obvious being the shape of the boat and sail. With the exception of the strong horizontals of the boat seats and the distant horizon, and the diagonal oars, the composition is composed of semi-circles. From the rower’s circular bottom and blue sash, to the circular bottoms of the skirts, to the curved poses of hands, arms, and hats, there is clever play of echoing curves. In addition, the bold yellow parts of the boat in the foreground are subtly played out in the sail, the mother’s hat, and buildings along the horizon. Mary Cassatt knows how to make a very satisfying painting.

A business woman, philanthropist, and women’s rights advocate, Berthe Honore Palmer invited Cassatt to the paint a mural on the north tympanum of the Gallery of Honor in the Woman’s Pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The theme, “Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science” (1893) (58’ x 12’) was Cassatt’s response to women’s rights. To her good friend Louisine Havemeyer, Cassatt wrote: “I am going to do a decoration for the Chicago Exhibition. When the committee offered it to me to do, at first I was horrified, but gradually I began to think it would be great fun to do something I had never done before and as the bare idea of such a thing put Degas into a rage and he did not spare every criticism he could think of, I got my spirit up and said I would not give up the idea for anything.” Suffragettes would have approved of the theme, but the general public heavily criticized Cassatt. The panel disappeared after the end of the Exposition.

Before meeting Degas in 1878, Cassatt admired Degas’s pastels. In 1875 she said, “I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.” “Nurse Reading to a Little Girl” (1895) (pastel) (26.6’’x28.7’’) is but one more example of Cassatt’s artistic expertise.

Cassatt and Degas disagreed over the Dreyfus affair in 1894 to 1906; she was pro-Dreyfus, and their friendship ended. On her first trip home in 1898, a Philadelphia newspaper noted only that she was home, had studied painting, and had a small Pekingese dog. She was made a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor in 1904, and also was made Honorary President of the Paris Art League, a school for American women students in Paris. Never a person to hold back her opinions, which were often quite sharp, when visiting the 1908 Paris Salon she saw: “Dreadful paintings and people gathered together in one Place. I wanted to be taken home at once.” She made a trip to Egypt with her brother Gardner in 1910, and on her return stated she was “crushed by the strength of this Art. I fought against it, but it conquered, it is surely the greatest art the past has left us…how are my feeble hands to ever paint the effect on me.”

In 1911 she was diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism and cataracts and by 1914 she stopped making art. She showed eighteen works in a 1915 exhibition supporting the women’s suffrage movement. George Biddle, painter and fellow Philadelphian, described Cassatt: “She drew the almost impossible line between her social life and her art, and never sacrificed an iota to either. Socially and emotionally she remained the prim Philadelphia spinster of her generation.” Cassatt’s work today sells for prices from two to five million dollars. Although she spent most of her life in Paris, she asserted, “I am American, definitely and frankly American.”

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.

 

 

It’s probably about time to come clean. To let family and friends know I “have a past.” It’s finally time to admit to four stupid transgressions, the memories of which I can recall in minute detail decades after they occurred. 

Simply and plainly, I have an undetected record as a trespasser. I invaded private homes, without the owners’ permission, on four occasions. I do not like to think what may have happened if I had been reported to the authorities. Trespassing, breaking and entering? Who knows?  

The first two offenses happened in my teenage years, another in my 50s and the final one in my 70s. Some might say I had “a problem.”

So here are the stories. 

Number One:

I grew up in a small colonial town—Haddonfield—in Southern New Jersey.  It was a bedroom community for people working in nearby Camden or, across the Delaware River, in Philadelphia.  In those days Camden was home to manufacturing facilities of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).  The fathers of many of my friends worked for RCA.  In the mid-1940s RCA was designing and building the earliest television sets. Engineers there were permitted to take their handiwork home to test it and experiment with it.  

The father of my high school friend, Bill,was one of those engineers. One day Bill asked me if I would like to see his father’s TV which had been installed in the family’s  nicely appointed attic (It probably had been placed in the highest point in the house in order to receive strong signal reception). Of course I wanted to see that exciting invention.  So I rode my bicycle to his house where Bill led me up two flights of stairs to see the set. It displayed programming on just one channel, transmitted over the air from Philadelphia.  Even though I cannot recall what I saw that day, I was floored. It was a miracle to see folks moving around and talking on the tiny screen which was perhaps 6 by 8 inches in size.

The next day was Saturday and Dad did not have to go to his office.  I told him about seeing Bill’s TV and asked if he would like to see it.  My enthusiasm was so great he could not resist saying “yes.”   He drove the two of us to Bill’s house.  We went up to the walk, rang the doorbell and knocked on the door but there was no reply. I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. Opening the door, we called loudly “Hello!” but, again, there was no response.  No one was home.  What to do?

 “Come on Dad, “I said, “Let me show it to you.”  In an instant we bounded up to the second floor and then up another stairway to the attic.  There it was, just like I had seen it the day before. A small, rectangular, metal box-like device with that tiny screen. I turned it on, just like Bill had done, and we watched whatever was on the screen for a few minutes, exactly how long I cannot remember. Then we retraced our steps, down to the second floor and down one more to the center hallway and the front door and walked to the car.  I do not recall that my father ever spoke to me about our illicit venture. He might have found it too embarrassing. 

It has been more than seven decades since Bill and I were in high school together. I would see him from time to time, most often at our 1949 class reunions.  However, I never told him what happened one Saturday afternoon, so many years before, when two people, anxious to experience the earliest thrill of television, entered his family’s home without permission. Perhaps it is time to do so.  

Number Two.

I was just a few weeks into my freshman year at Johns Hopkins and about to turn 18 later that fall. All the undergraduates at Hopkins in those days were young men.  If one did not have a car it was difficult to meet young women at Goucher College or at the Hopkins School of Nursing across town. Someone told me about a youth group at the nearby Second Presbyterian Church. It was reported that Baltimore high school girls attended Sunday evening meetings there.  So, on Sunday evenings, I began walking to the church at the corner of Charles and St. Paul Streets. And, in short order, I met a nice girl. A few weeks later I worked up my courage to ask her for a movie date.  

 She lived in the Northwood section of the city, east of the campus. I did not have a car so the logistics of dating someone beyond walking distance from the campus were complicated. Getting to her home meant taking a bus from the campus neighborhood east to Loch Raven Boulevard, leaving the bus near where her street intersected with the boulevard, and walking to her home about a block away. And that is what I did on our first date. We met at her front door and walked back to the bus stop and rode to the intersection of Greenmount Avenue and 33rd St., the location of the popular, art deco styled Boulevard movie theater. After the show, it was back to the bus and her Northwood neighborhood. I did all of that because I had visions of future dates. 

Suddenly, however, what had been a pleasant evening almost turned into a disaster.  

As we approached her dark, brick, colonial style home she reached for her purse and gasped. “What’s the matter?” I said. “My keys! My keys!  I don’t have my keys.”  My calm and confident reply was “Can’t we just knock on the door and ask your mother or dad to let you in?”   “Oh no,” she said, “they would kill me if I woke them up.”  “So what can we do,” I asked. 

“See that window up there on the second floor?” she said, pointing to a window on the upper right corner of the house.  “It’s unlocked. You could get a big ladder from the garage, go up and climb through the window and come downstairs and let me in.  I cannot recall my precise feelings at that moment. But today, more than 70 years later, my palms still break out in a sweat when I think about doing what she had suggested.  

Nonetheless I quickly thought that I knew how to put an extension ladder up to a second floor window. I had done it many times at my home, in southern New Jersey, as I helped my father put on and take off screens and storm windows from our second floor windows.  So, whatever my thoughts at the time, I followed her down a driveway to the rear of the house, entered a two car, detached garage, found the large, heavy, wooden, ladder and carried it to a spot below my date’s bedroom window.  

I extended the ladder so the top was just under the window sill, climbed up, raised the unlocked window and crawled in. Guided only by the dim glow of an exterior street light I found my way through her room and into an upstairs hall.  I scrambled down a wide set of stairs leading to the entrance hall and the front door. I unlocked the door, opened it, ran outside, lowered the ladder, took it back to the garage, came back to the front step where she was waiting and said goodbye. I ran, almost flew,  down the street to the bus stop. I still wonder what would have happened if her parents or her sister had heard me only inches from them,  just outside their bedroom doors. My palms become moist again. Another date?  Not a chance. That was a “one and done.”

Number 3 

Sometime in the late 1970s or 80s my neighbor and friend, Ted, introduced me to duck and goose hunting on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.  Our normal routine was to crawl out of bed, in our Baltimore homes, about 3 AM and drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, to a rural area near Easton  where he had reserved some hunting spots from local farmers. One time, however, Ted said a friend had invited him to use his house the night before we were to hunt. He would not be home and we were welcome to use it and save ourselves that early morning drive from Baltimore. 

We were enthused about the prospect of having a nice place to stay before a day of hunting. We planned to leave Baltimore about three in the afternoon but Ted was delayed by a business issue. When we finally left it was almost 9 PM. Everything went smoothly.  Traffic was light at the time of the evening. Ted said all we had to do was travel down Route 50 toward Easton and that he had directions where to turn off the highway to the house where we would spend the night.  

Not far from Easton Ted turned onto the designated well paved road that led us through several miles of farm land which was well hidden by the dense darkness of that night. “One more turn and we’ll be there,” Ted said, reassuringly.  Sure enough, he found the road, this time a narrow dirt trail winding through more acres of fields that had been loaded with corn in the summer months. 

“I haven’t seen any houses along here,” I said. “Don’t worry,” Ted replied. “His place is a couple of miles up the road. I was here before.”   And, sure enough, in a few minutes, a ranch style house appeared on our left.  The lights were on. “Nice of him to leave the lights on for us,” I said.  “Great guy,” Ted responded. 

We pulled into the drive and as soon as we stopped we began unloading our hunting clothes so we would have them ready when we dressed before sunrise. Warm hats, gloves, heavy jackets, wool shirts, long underwear, thick socks and boots.  We locked the shotguns and ammunition in the trunk. 

On the way up to the front door Ted said his friend “always has some deli stuff for sandwiches and beer in the fridge.”  As son as we opened the door to the fully lighted room we were greeted by a friendly, tail-waging golden retriever.  No barking, he just wanted to be petted.  We lay our gear on the floor and Ted went toward the kitchen. I lingered a bit and looked around the attractive living room that was decorated tastefully with Eastern Shore décor, dark wood paneling, waterfowl paintings, duck decoys and the like.  I also looked at a handsome antique desk and noticed some envelopes on it, apparently addressed to the owner. 

“What did you say your friend’s name was, Ted?” I asked.  Coming out of the kitchen with a bottle of beer and sandwich in his hand he told me the name.  I had a sudden heart palpitation.  “Ted,” I said.  “That is not the name on these envelopes.  I think we are in the wrong house.”  Ted looked at the mail on the desk and blanched. “Oh, my God.  We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. 

We grabbed everything we had brought in, left in an instant, and once again headed down the road. “I was sure that was his place,” Ted said. “I guess we didn’t go far enough.” We continued on the dirt road until we spotted another ranch style house, this one with no welcoming lights. 

“This is it,” Ted said. Once again we unloaded our hunting gear and walked through an unlocked front door.  No lights, no dog.  We did not take time to explore the kitchen. There was a bedroom off the living room with twin beds.  Not bothering to undress and so exhausted by the events of the evening and the late hour, we simply lay on the beds and went to sleep.  Morning would arrive too soon. We would rise from our “guest house” beds, gather up all of our hunting gear and head for the duck blind along Skipton Creek.  “I wonder if the family in the first house will notice that a bottle of beer and some deli meat and bread went missing over night,” I asked Ted. 

Number 4

For many years my wife, Lynn, and I owned a summer cottage on Wellesley Island in the St. Lawrence River in Upstate New York.  It was in a small community of mostly gingerbread styled Victorian homes built in the latter part of the 19th Century.  It is one of those little summer enclaves where everyone knows everyone else and no one worries about home security. Doors are never locked except at the end of the season when the electricity is shut off and the water drained from the pipes and folks head to a place they call home where they will stay until migrating back next spring. 

So it was on a lazy, summer day in August, some years ago, when we were awaiting the delivery of  twin-bed mattresses for the two old iron beds in the green room, aka the front room, upstairs.  We had placed an order a few weeks earlier with Mary Reinman in nearby Clayton, NY (pop. 3,000+) She, with her husband, Bill, are the proprietors of Reineman’s Department Store in Clayton, a true throwback to the days when “department store” meant “If you need it, we’ve got it or we will get it for you.”  For more than 40 years we were loyal and grateful customers of Mary and Bill and, before them, Jimmy and Gloriann, Mary’s parents, who managed the store for more years that even the local, year-round residents can remember.  

The Reinman’s were dependable.  If they said a delivery would be there on a particular day at a a particular time you could count on it.  In this case  the mattresses were due at 3:00 on a Friday afternoon.  So, after cleaning up from a late lunch, we decided to sit on the porch and keep an eye out for the loud, lumbering Reinmann truck to come to the house.  It was “high season” and things were very busy at the store.  Bill might make the delivery himself.  We passed the time by watching the boats zooming about the river a short distance away.  Friday always signaled the beginning of the weekend and greatly increased boating activity. 

Three o’clock came but there was no sign of the Reinman truck.  “Must be very busy,” I said to Lynn. Then it was 3:30 and 4:00 PM.  “I’m going to call Mary,” I said with a twinge of annoyance. 

“Hi Mary, It’s Ross.  We were supposed to receive our mattresses this afternoon. Remember?”  “Yes, I do, we put them on the truck this morning and Dave said he delivered them.”  “Well, we have been waiting for them and they are not here.”  “I can’t imagine where they are.”

Suddenly I remembered that a new family named Jones had just moved in to a house up the street.  Coincidentally they had bought a house that used to belong to my mother and stepfather, a house we knew very well having spent many summer vacations there.  “I bet they delivered the mattresses to the new Jones family,” I said to Lynn.  “Let’s walk over and see.”

We went to the house, opened the screen door to the large wrap-around porch, and knocked on the front door.  No answer. Turning the knob, I opened the door.  “Hello, anyone home?”  Silence. “Let’s check upstairs.”  So we went up to the second floor and, sure enough, the two mattresses, still wrapped in their protective coverings were leaning against the walls of the hallway that was so familiar to us.  

“Let’s take them to the house,” I said.  Lynn picked up the end of one of the mattresses and I took the other end and we carried them down the street, into our cottage, and up to the second floor where the old beds were awaiting their new companions.  We repeated the same journey to retrieve the second mattress. 

I  phoned Mary and explained what happened.  She was nonplussed and there was a tone of annoyance to her voice.  It was the last thing she needed to deal with on a busy Friday afternoon in the “high season.” “Glad you figured it out,” she said. As for the new Jones family, they never knew what had happened.  

Ross Jones is a former vice president and secretary emeritus of The Johns Hopkins University. He joined the University in 1961 as assistant to President Milton S. Eisenhower. A 1953 Johns Hopkins graduate, he later earned a Master’s Degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism