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Mary Cassatt Painting
Mrs Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, ReadingOil on canvas, 1876 This beautiful Mary Cassatt painting of Mrs Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading is faithfully re-created in oils. Despite the loyalties to the United States which she was later to demonstrate, once settled in Paris Mary Cassatt tended to keep her distance from the city’s American expatriate community. However, the mid 1870s saw her struggling to support her studio, and to do this she had to produce the ‘pot-boilers’, including commissioned portraits, which, her father later reported, she could not ‘bear the idea of being obliged to do’. However, Mrs Duffee’s picture relates not only to the conventional charms of other contemporary works, but also to Cassatt’s considered depictions of the quiet and peculiarly female pursuits of the leisured middle classes in such paintings as Young Girl with a Portfolio of Pictures and The Reader, both of which project a quality of self-containment that reflects Cassatt’s own intellectual independence and strength. Her own love of reading earned her a reputation for learning and an ever-expanding circle of ‘litterary people’, as Mr Cassatt wrote. The motif of reading recurs among painters of the early 1900s, in which Cassatt portrays her anonymous readers in educative or communal roles, as in Family Group Reading or Two Women Reading, both of 1901. This development may have been linked to the artist’s own changing activity, which came to centre on the communication of her knowledge and opinions to art collectors and suffrage campaigners alike, after a long period of dedicated self-training. Enjoy this Mary Cassatt painting on your wall by commissioning an oil painting reproduction. Simply choose your size from the drop-down menu below and click "add to cart" using our secure online server. Own An Original Re-Creation
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Hand-painted in oils by a professional artist
