On The Balcony
by Mary Cassatt

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On The Balcony
By Mary Cassatt

On The Balcony
by Mary Cassatt

Oil on canvas, 1873
101 x 83 cm

On The Balcony by Mary Cassatt captures her capacity to assimilate the varied influences she admired which is evident here.

Her visit to Spain was a time of particular excitements as she discovered the ‘fine and simple’ style of Velazquez and other Spanish masters which had inspired Cassatt’s American contemporary Thomas Eakins to produce Spanish-style genre paintings.

Cassatt had already painted a successful balcony scene in Parma the year before, Two Women Throwing Flowers During Carnival.

In this later picture, On The Balcony by Mary Cassatt, the smooth, lyrical movements of the women seen in close-up are replaced by more realistic, awkward poses. The additional shadowy male figure is used as a compositional device to close off the background of the scene, in a way employed much later in The Boating Party, although here he is unusual in visibly participating in the psychological action.

A similar use of the male figure could have been noted by Cassatt in Manet’s picture The Balcony, which had appeared in the Paris Salon of 1869, and in Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, now in New York but in a European collection at this date. Both these inspirational works depicted the modern scene of their times, but Cassatt’s work is closer in spirit to the Goya, in the vivacity of its cast of characters and their involvement in a festival atmosphere. The colors are darker and more thickly applied than in her earlier Italian work, and it seems likely that she painted with only the minimum of preliminary drawing.

Her interest in the fall of light, especially her predilection for leaving faces in shadow, was to recur soon after in her Parisian opera pictures. This, together with the technical difficulties presented by the positions of the heads, indicates that Cassatt was setting herself deliberate challenges (here of foreshortening), as she would later do with her ceaseless drawing practice.

This rigorous self-training was hard on both the artist and her sitters, as she acknowledged with good humour. She wrote to Emily Sartain, then in Paris, that her model had ‘asked me if the people who pose for me live long’.

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