Mary Cassatt
Art Work

Cup of Tea

Oil on canvas, 1880
92 x 65 cm

This Mary Cassatt art work was exhibited in the Impressionist Show of 1881, where she received particularly appreciative comments from the critic and novelist J K Huysmans:

“…Here is family life, painted with distinction, and with love. In this group of Mary Cassatt art work there is an affectionate understanding of quiet domesticity, a heightened sense of intimacy. In …The Cup of Tea, a smiling women, dressed in rose colored clothes, sits in a chair, holding in her gloved hands a cup of tea…these works accentuate the same note of tenderness, and exude a delicate fragrance of Parisian elegance.

“This indeed is the most characteristic quality of her talent, that Mary Cassatt, who, I believe, is an American, paints French women, but manages somehow to introduce into her Parisian interiors an ‘at home’ feeling. She has succeeded in expressing, as none of our own painters have managed to do, the joyful peace, the tranquil friendliness of the domestic interior”.

The arrival of Cassatt’s parents and sister in Paris in 1877 had changed her life irrevocably, but she immediately put their familiar presence to good use. Cassatt reinvented her amendable sister Lydia according to the mood and subject she was intent on capturing. Here Lydia invalid, swaddled in fleecy ruffles, her shadowed complexion the foil for her pink and white garments and an audience of pot plants.

The everyday objects of the family apartment were likewise an infinitely flexible resource which she could handle confidently, knowing their peculiar qualities and how these might best serve her artistic aims.

Mary Cassatt always made a virtue out of the limitations placed around her ambitions, repeating motifs and working in series throughout her career, and to the last advising her pupils that the artist must work ‘in a fixed environment, and not change it very often’. Peaceful domestic ritual was therefore a congenial motif, and a key element in the life which sustained her art.

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Cup of Tea
By Cassatt

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