Mary Cassatt
Self Portrait

Self Portrait

Oil on canvas, 1880
33 x 24 cm

This Mary Cassatt self portrait is unusual in its detail and expressiveness, and notable for the role in which Cassatt casts herself. Mary Cassatt used water-color almost exclusively for rapid sketches of subjects to be worked up into finished oils or pastels later.

The face is delicately handled, despite the heavy shoulders necessarily cast by the hat. Unusually, nuances of shading on the face, and the edges of cuff and collar, are indicated through lines, although the surrounding brushwork demonstrates her habitually dashing style.

Usually uneasy as a subject for portraiture herself (as opposed to posing anonymously on occasion for Degas), Mary Cassatt here appears self-possessed, her look direct. The single faint blue line which cuts off her figure to the right is enough to show her as an artist in traditional pose before an easel or drawing-board.

Through this pose she relates herself to that ancient line of artists, most famously Rembrandt but more recently including Cassatt’s hero Courbet, who had depicted themselves in similar, with the tools of their trade. Women painters too, including the Italian, Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1593-1652) and several eighteenth century French portraitists, had employed this strategy to assert their professional identities. In these self-images it is the audience who are scrutinized by the artist’s eye, not vice versa, and this reversal of roles between observer and object within Cassatt’s picture allows her figure the penetrating gaze of the artist.

In this Mary Cassatt Self Portrait she simultaneously, and perhaps confusingly, also chooses to depict herself as a fashionable young women, typically the focus of a male audience’s scrutiny and admiration. The presence of her large yellow hat bears witness to her wide-ranging interest in fashion. She always kept her Philadelphian sisters-in-law informed on the latest Parisian modes, and was careful to dress her models in clothes which would contribute both decoration and modernity to her pictures of women.

Cassatt’s decision to pursue a career rather than marriage and motherhood made her contact with these conventional attributes of female existence more, not less, important to her – essential reference points in her exploration of modern truths.

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Self Portrait
By Cassatt

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