Mary Cassatt

(American, 1844-1926)

Woman and Child in Front of a Fruit Tree

, 1893

pastel on paper

signed M Cassatt (upper right)

17 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches.

This work is included as no. 1132 in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonné of the works of Mary Cassatt.

Provenance:

(likely) Ambroise Vollard, Paris

Private Collection, New York, 1940s

Adelson Galleries, New York, 2009

Hammer Galleries, New York, 2011

Purchased from the above by the present owner

Exhibited:

New York, Hammer Galleries, On Paper: Impressionist, Modern and Post-War Masters, May 28 - August 31, 2012, p. 6, illus.

New York, Hammer Galleries, Winter 2013: Selected Works by Grandma Moses and Other American Masters, February 11 - March 31, 2013

New York, Leila Heller Gallery, Look at Me: Portraiture from Manet to the Present, May 8 - August 14, 2014, illus. (on loan from Hammer Galleries)

Lot note:

Dated to 1893, the present pastel is likely part of a series of works associated with Mary Cassatt’s Modern Woman mural. This mural was one of the American impressionist’s most ambitious and largest projects, created for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Along with its companion, Primitive Woman, painted by Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, the two murals celebrated women’s progress and achievements through history. The large artworks were commissioned by Bertha Palmer, the President of the Board of Lady Managers and wife of Potter Palmer, a real estate developer, businessman, and owner of Chicago’s famous Palmer House. Mrs. Palmer was the driving force behind the success of the Woman’s Building, which lauded the accomplishments of women artists, poets, educators, and reformers and became one of the fair’s most popular attractions.

Designed by Sophia Hayden, the first professionally trained woman architect in the United States, the Woman’s Building included a two-hundred-foot-long, double-storied central court. The murals were placed at each end, with MacMonnie’s work on the north tympana and Cassatt's on the south. Palmer’s directive to the two artists was to depict “…something symbolic showing the advancement of woman. My idea was that perhaps we might show woman in her primitive condition as a bearer of burdens and doing drudgery…and as a contrast, woman in the position she occupies today” (quoted in Sally Webster, Eve’s Daughter/Modern Woman: A Mural by Mary Cassatt, Urbana, 2004, p. 62). Done in three panels, Cassatt’s mural was a contemporary allegory titled “Young Girls Pursuing Fame,” “Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science,” and “The Arts, Music, Dancing.”

Woman and Child in Front of a Fruit Tree most closely relates to the subject matter of the central panel “Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science,” and is likely a study for an oil painting, Child Picking a Fruit (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia), also related to the mural (Adelyn Dohme Breeskin, Mary Cassatt - A Catalogue raisonné of the oils, pastels, watercolors and drawings, Washington DC, 1970, p. 108, no. 216). The theme of this panel likely refers to the recently acquired access to college education by women. Set in an Eden with no Adam or Serpent, Cassatt’s work shows modern Eves gathering the fruits of knowledge and passing them from one generation to the next. The artist’s positive spin on Eve’s disobedience is linked to the new feminist theology articulated by American activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who maintained that without Eve’s subordination, “humankind would remain forever indifferent to the power of the intellect” (Webster, p. 78).

Although the present pastel does not directly refer to a specific scene within the mural, a woman holds a young child, with vivid green fruit hanging on a tree behind them, ripe and ready for picking. Cassatt’s characteristically assured strokes of pink, yellow, black, and even blue pastels skillfully render their heads. The woman’s face is cast downwards, seemingly lost in maternal thoughts, while the baby gazes forward into an unknown future. Like many artifacts from the fair, the Modern Woman mural has been lost to time. It is only in works such as Woman and Child in Front of a Fruit Tree that Cassatt’s transgressive and hopeful message lives on.