Mary Cassatt was a fine artist, as Degas

Nancy Hale is an accomplished novelist and essayist, the daughter of New England artists remembered mainly for the charming memoirs she wrote about them. Doubtless she felt this background qualified her to write the life of one of America’s best-known painters, Mary Cassatt, ranking with the foremost French Impressionists, whose cause she championed and with whom she exhibited from 1877 on. Cassatt’s significance, as artist and as the person who persuaded rich Americans, most notably Mr. and Mrs. Horace Have-meyer, to collect Impressionist pictures at a time when the French still ridiculed them, has long been recognized; she has had many competent and literate biographers, so that apart from having gleaned reminiscences from a few ageing friends and relatives who remembered Mary Cassatt as an old blind lady in her chateau outside Paris, Miss Hale adds little to what has long been familiar.

Mary Cassatt’s life lacks drama. She was just a maiden lady from Philadelphia (she was actually born in western Pennsylvania, a fact Miss Hale inexplicably makes much of), comfortably well-off, devoted to her family but, like her contemporaries Whistler, Sargent, and Henry James, a lifelong expatriate. What is memorable about her is her art, of which the supercritical Degas once wryly remarked, “I will not believe that a woman can draw so well.” Only two important things happened to her: her encounter with and swift, intuitive understanding of the Impressionists, and her long friendship with Degas. Undoubtedly his influence on her was deep and lasting; she did not mind being referred to as his pupil (which, in fact, she never was), and her admiration for him never faltered. But Miss Hale’s endless speculations as to whether they did or didn’t sleep together—she reluctantly concludes they probably didn’t—arc largely irrelevant.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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Nancy Hale is an accomplished novelist and essayist, the daughter of New England artists remembered mainly for the charming memoirs she wrote about them. Doubtless she felt this background qualified her to write the life of one of America’s best-known painters, Mary Cassatt, ranking with the foremost French Impressionists, whose cause she championed and with whom she exhibited from 1877 on. Cassatt’s significance, as artist and as the person who persuaded rich Americans, most notably Mr. and Mrs. Horace Have-meyer, to collect Impressionist pictures at a time when the French still ridiculed them, has long been recognized; she has had many competent and literate biographers, so that apart from having gleaned reminiscences from a few ageing friends and relatives who remembered Mary Cassatt as an old blind lady in her chateau outside Paris, Miss Hale adds little to what has long been familiar.

Mary Cassatt’s life lacks drama. She was just a maiden lady from Philadelphia (she was actually born in western Pennsylvania, a fact Miss Hale inexplicably makes much of), comfortably well-off, devoted to her family but, like her contemporaries Whistler, Sargent, and Henry James, a lifelong expatriate. What is memorable about her is her art, of which the supercritical Degas once wryly remarked, “I will not believe that a woman can draw so well.” Only two important things happened to her: her encounter with and swift, intuitive understanding of the Impressionists, and her long friendship with Degas. Undoubtedly his influence on her was deep and lasting; she did not mind being referred to as his pupil (which, in fact, she never was), and her admiration for him never faltered. But Miss Hale’s endless speculations as to whether they did or didn’t sleep together—she reluctantly concludes they probably didn’t—arc largely irrelevant.