Mary Cassatt
b. Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, 1844–1926
Young Girl Reading (Jeune fille lisant)
c. 1894
Pastel on paper
The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.853)
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Transcript
Mary Cassatt, Young Girl Reading (Jeune fille lisant) (circa 1894)
[00:00:00] Mary Cassatt, Young Girl Reading (Jeune fille lisant) (circa 1894). This is Mary Cassatt’s Young Girl Reading. It’s a portrait of a young girl with evidently well brushed shiny golden hair looking down at her book. She’s deep in thought and her eyes are glued to the paper as she awaits to turn the page to find out what happens next.
To me, Cassatt is capturing the all consuming sensation of reading a book when you’re so immersed in a fictional world. This girl looks like she’s on the cusp of adolescence, and, although I’m speculating, I wonder if she’s reading something like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, published nearly three decades before, that follows the story of the four March sisters, who are figuring out their transition to womanhood.
I wonder if this girl is doing the [00:01:00] same, trying to understand what it means to be female in 19th century society, and the limitations of what that brings. After all, so much of fiction, and what we see in art, prepares us for what we experience in reality. To me, Cassatt sympathises with the girl she is portraying.
By picturing her reading, she is recognizing women’s ambition at the time, to be educated. This was Cassatt’s ambition too. Born in the US in 1844, she was able to pursue an art career thanks to her family’s support. She learned French and travelled to France as a child, and from 1874, settled in Paris where she would remain for the rest of her life.
Cassatt is often known for her association with the Impressionists, artists who worked in a style that aimed to capture an impression of something, as opposed to the real [00:02:00] thing. And it’s this that we see here, a snapshot of a moment, an impression, of a girl deep in thought, reading a book. Cassatt’s paintings are made up of feathery brushstrokes and splinter like shapes.
But this is an example of her pastel work, and I love how, just like painting, she plays with texture so vividly. Look at how filled in and smooth her face is. I can almost feel the warm blooded flesh. A stark contrast to the arms, book pages, and backdrop, which appear scratchy and rough and verge an abstraction.
And it’s intriguing how she’s used texture as a compositional device to direct us to the main event, the young girl’s concentrated face.
