Intimate Impressions

Artist Mary Cassatt had a four-decade relationship with Edgar Degas, the Frenchman who influenced her more than any other colleague, even though he was a notorious misogynist. So could it have been sweet revenge when she included his work in a 1915 New York gallery show benefiting women’s suffrage?

Cassatt’s surrogate sister was Louisine Havemeyer, a fellow feminist whose daughter Electra Havemeyer Webb founded the Shelburne Museum. “Mary Cassatt: Friends and Family,” an exhibit featuring about 43 of her works, begins there June 21. Part of the exhibit focuses on Cassatt’s relationship with Degas.

“Among the greats of French Impressionism — Monet, Renoir, Degas — there was only one American: That’s Mary Cassatt,” says Stephan Jost, the museum’s director. “And there was only one woman: That’s Mary Cassatt.” While the European establishment disdained them, this “bohemian subculture” gained acceptance in the United States largely thanks to Havemeyer.

A longtime expatriate in Paris, Cassatt specialized in portraits of mothers with their children. “What I love about her work is that it’s so intimate,” Jost says. “Most of the Impressionists were doing landscapes. Cassatt chose to paint people.”

But some people were second-class citizens, which led to the movement that Cassatt and Havemeyer embraced. “Louisine was arrested in 1919 for picketing the White House,” says museum archivist Polly Darnell. The protestors also burned an effigy of President Woodrow Wilson. Degas, who had died two years earlier, was surely rolling in his grave.

• What: “Mary Cassatt: Friends and Family”
• When: June 21–Oct. 26
• Where: Shelburne Museum, Shelburne
• Information: www.shelburnemuseum.org or 985-3346

— Susan Green, Vermont Life
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