Mary Cassatt at Work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

All those babies and pretty ladies are far more intense than we thought.

Y ears ago, I was at a faculty meeting at Phillips Academy in ye olde Andover meant to coach us on the new, 21st-century art of letters of recommendation. Much of it targeted letters for college admissions, but I’d written lots of letters on behalf of job seekers and thought I knew how to be effective. “Never use ‘hard worker’ or any variation of it,” the school’s college counselor told us. Brilliance and achievement go together, like chain reactions, and “hard worker” fatally implies a shortage of talent, or a shortage of sprezzatura, at least. That’s the art of making something difficult look easy and is more about sparkle than substance.

Channeling Calvin Coolidge, as I often do, I thought college admissions officers must be crazy, and decadent and dumb. “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence,” Coolidge said. “Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb,” he explained, adding that “nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent,” and don’t get him — or me — started on the curse of educated derelicts. There’s no substitute for persistence and determination.

Hard work, I’m happy to say, is getting a high five, in a museum, and in workaholic Benjamin Franklin’s hometown. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s revelatory Mary Cassatt at Work, at its best, explores the intense, idiosyncratic work ethic of one of America’s — and France’s — star Impressionists.

Cassatt (1844–1926) was the only American to exhibit in the renegade Impressionist salons, participating in four of the eight between 1874 and 1886. She’s best known for her depictions of often cute, sometimes fidgety and fussy toddlers and the women who care for them. Though she lived in France starting in 1874 till her death, her American home was in Philadelphia, via Pittsburgh. Her father made a fortune in land speculation. Her brother, Alexander, was a railroad magnate and visionary behind Penn Station, which brought west-of-the-Hudson train traffic directly to Manhattan.

Cassatt’s a staple in Impressionism shows and got a good survey at the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris I reviewed a few years ago. She’s famous and rightly well-regarded now, but so she was in her lifetime, in both Paris and America. She hasn’t had a glitzy look in America since the ’90s, though, and her working methods, or technique, haven’t been much studied. With 84 works by Cassatt in its collection, the PMA is perfect for the task. And 2024 is Impressionism’s 150th birthday.

So, it’s the ideal moment. Cassatt at Work aims at multiple themes. First, it’s a survey of her biggest hits. Over 40 or so active years, she was prolific, making 320 paintings, 380 pastels, and 215 prints. Second, Cassatt was committed to art-making as a self-sustaining career. As a single woman, this was an extraordinary mission and makes the show a study in how she, as an individual, navigated gender politics. What pushed and pulled her? Third, what does her choice of subjects — almost entirely young, affluent women, women and children, and families — say about modern life writ large? Fourth, she was a daring technician and, dare I write it, a hard worker. How does this make her work special and vibrant today?

The themes overlap and emerge slowly and thoughtfully. Most of Cassatt’s big hits are on view. These are the ones that are in art-history surveys of American art or Impressionism. They’re always flogging the same points about women artists or the modern French woman in public. Woman in a Loge from 1879 and In the Loge from 1878 are her two famous out-and-about paintings of women alone and at the theater. I’ve seen both in lots of shows over the years, so they’ve become icons. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair was her star turn at the 1879 Impressionist salon and always fresh. A Balcony in Seville from 1873 is awkward and could be called juvenilia, except that Cassatt was near 30 when she painted it. There’s the PMA’s grand Driving and portraits of Cassatt’s mother from around 1889 and of her brother, Alexander, and his son from 1884. These are both usually on view at the PMA and well known.

Much is made of Cassatt’s assessment of herself as an independent and self-supporting woman, which she was and wasn’t. Her father was rich, and she got a lifetime allowance. He insisted that she support her studio on her own earnings, but money’s fungible, on the one hand. On the other, she bought her country villa with money borrowed from her dealer with future sales as collateral.

Her story is so idiosyncratic I’ll toss a third and fourth hand into the mix. Cassatt’s parents, nouveau riche and American, weren’t conventional. In 1851, her father retired and moved his family to Europe. Mary, called Mame at home, lived in London, Paris, and Heidelberg as a child. In her teens, she attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, without hysterical resistance at home. By her 20s, she was studying in Rome and Paris. She got lots of family support, financially and morally, along the way. I didn’t know and learned from the exhibition that her parents and her sister lived with Cassatt in Paris from the late 1860s until the last of the trio — her mother — died in 1895. Cassatt had lots of help dealing with them, each an invalid in his or her own way, but she led the crew of caregivers. Often months passed when she had no time for art.

So, Cassatt’s life, as are all of our lives, was unique. Cassatt at Work by no means presents her as a victim of misogyny, but she’s not a good vehicle to get to a very new understanding of “dramatic social change.” As an American in Paris, she was an outsider, and as a rich American in the outré field of art, her guardrails are impossible to universalize. There’s some good, new material in the catalogue on her adept networking with her dealers and American collectors, but it doesn’t make it into the exhibition the public sees.

Among the thrills of Cassatt at Work is seeing so many pastels from private collections. Clarissa from the early 1890s introduces the exhibition. Woman in a Black Hat and Raspberry Costume from 1900 is there. I’d never seen The Banjo Lesson from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It’s from 1893. These and other pastels are brilliant, and the two essays in the catalogue on her pastels are brilliantly presented.

“It changed my life,” Cassatt wrote about seeing the pastels of Edgar Degas in 1875. From around 1878 to her last pastel in 1914, the medium was her favorite.

Pastels are pure color, like paint in a tube but unsullied by oil mixed with pigment. Chalk can be quickly applied, doesn’t take time to dry, and has a matte rather than shiny look. It evokes sketching and, thus, immediacy. Cassatt loved pastel in part because of its history. It’s a Rococo-era medium exploiting delicate flesh tones and fine materials like ribbons and flowers. Pastel palettes were more tonal rather than contrasting. Cassatt turned history on its head, though, abandoning a dainty application of chalk and subtle grades of color for long, bold slashes, lots of cross-hatching, heavy chalking, and color contrasts with oomph. She sometimes crushed pastel, mixed it with water, and used the mix like paint. Faces and hands are often very finished but, in “The Banjo Lesson,” Cassatt is at her most abstract with costumes. Big passages of paper are untouched by pigment so the works seem unfinished, but they’re signed. They have the look of a moment.

Kathleen Foster’s essay on Cassatt’s pastel style and her and Thomas Primeau’s essay on her pastel crayons and papers are wonderful and needed to be more thoroughly reflected in the exhibition. For an exhibition about working methods, their observations were, odd to say, thought to be too technical. This is a sin on many fronts, common as it might be. Curators, museum educators, and in-house marketeers think the public’s too dumb for detail. People focus on paintings, not on words on paper, second-class citizens among media that they are. Goodness, hundreds of hours were spent in conservation labs analyzing these objects. Tell the public what you discovered! Don’t leave delicious nuggets in the back of the book that only 1 percent of the visitors will buy. We’re Americans. We like to know how things are made.

Cassatt’s set of ten prints from the 1890s is the beef bourguignon of the show. Making prints, we see, is messy, exacting, uphill, sweaty work. Ink, heat, acid, sharp little tools, petulant papers, and a home printing press jousted with Cassatt as she achieved her vision for a portfolio depicting women working with their hands, caring for children, dressing, and at leisure. Japanese woodblock prints inspired her. They were a craze among Parisian artists in the 1880s for their strong, direct shapes, pops of color, and seemingly simple lines.

In a single, big gallery, Cassatt at Work plumbs her path from vision to results. The Bath is and isn’t complicated. A woman in a yellow, patterned frock kneels by a blue tub filled with water. With one hand, she tests the temperature. With another, she holds, or arrests might be better, a naked, standing toddler about to be dunked. The baby looks like a junior sumo wrestler. Their bodies pull in opposite directions. The woman’s practiced and focused, her grip on the baby firm. She’s a multitasker. The baby’s mostly lines but, simple blob of babyhood he or she might be, there’s heft, energy, and animation to be had.

The scene’s spare but bewitching for its contrast of yellow and blue, an Impressionist favorite. The Fitting is not monochromatic, but its dull pink, yellow, and brown are far more subtle. Woman Bathing is the closest Cassatt comes to riotous for its stripes, patterns, and sweeps of unadorned space. The process from The Bath’s start as a crayon drawing to the finished drypoint, soft-ground etching, and aquatint involved nearly two dozen steps, with the print-making part requiring at least 17 versions. Drypoint, etching, and aquatint each involve a trip to the acid bath since they’re different techniques. Cassatt was a fanatic in getting the balance of line, texture, and tone, which made her work more intense.

Through incessant experimentation, she became a queen of aquatint, the medium of choice for ethereal, ghostly effects. In The Visitor from 1881 and Waiting from 1879, her figures are there but not there.

The exhibition enhanced my understanding and appreciation of Cassatt’s art. It seems a new fashion among curators focusing on a single artist to do neither. Good for the PMA to clear what, to me, is a low bar by looking at art for art’s sake. Cassatt at Work is elegantly presented and does indeed get beyond the babies, mostly. As a painter, she’s hit and miss. Her clunkers rattle, wheeze, and lumber. But as a pastelist and printmaker, she is among the gods. How she got there — her talent, perseverance, perspicacity, and her good ol’ American sales savvy — make Cassatt at Work a must-see.

What’s American about Cassatt? I’d start with her paintings, my least favorite of her work. Family Group Reading, a favorite from the PMA painted in 1898, has the good, solid, realist look of American illustration. It’s crisp and clear. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair is dazzling, despite being as well-known as it is. The child model was French, but the image of a child, sick and tired of finery and, possibly, of her parents putting her on parade for show, collapses in pouty exasperation. That frankness is very American. Speaking of frankness, that Americans are among the hardest working people on Earth can’t be disputed.

When the field of American art history first developed, Cassatt was tagged as sentimental. Edgar Richardson called her the artist of “tea, clothes, and nursery, then nursery, clothes, and tea.” Catty, yes, and more than a tad misogynist, but not entirely false. Pattycake from the Denver Art Museum, a pastel from 1897, is very sweet indeed, sticky sweet, in fact. Sentimentality is more a Victorian flaw than a specifically American one, and Cassatt is of the era. Cassatt’s American roots can’t explain how leaden paintings like Mother and Two Children are. Oil paint might have been too viscous for her skills. The PMA doesn’t fess up, but Cassatt’s close friend and muse Degas worked on the background of Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. Cassatt initially planned a flat back wall. Degas vastly expanded the space by using wide-angle diagonals in back to make a corner. It’s hard work to ask for help, but she took it.

I’ve written this before, but Cassatt was the central mover and shaker in introducing Impressionism to American collectors. It’s no coincidence that so many French Impressionist jewels are in museums in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago. Starting in the 1880s, rich Americans visiting Paris knew to visit Cassatt to learn what they should see and, for the art savvy, whose work they ought to consider buying. She pushed her Impressionist confreres, whose bright, casual paintings appealed to American tastes for scrutability and good cheer. French establishment collectors, in the meantime, were too conservative to buy avant-garde work. Her advocacy explains why French museums need to borrow heavily from the U.S. to do a big Impressionist show. Patriotism comes in different forms and pays different dividends.