Mary Cassatt and The Boating Party

A lot has been written about the mastery and master pieces of such household names as Renoir, Monet and Pissarro. Their impressionistic art stand as a light of accomplishment and define the period of the late 1800s for many an art lover. The female impressionists and their contribution to both the movement and later developments have been less covered.

Among these we find Mary Cassatt paintings. The second female artist to join the impressionist movement, she exhibited with the group for the first time in 1877 and continued to be associated with them until she declared her independence from any specific artistic style in 1886. Even then, she was still in contact with friends like Renoir, Monet and Pissarro. While notable as an impressionist, it was actually after she set herself completely free that her most prolific period as an artist came about. Thus, in the 1890s, Cassatt produced many of her most well known paintings including The Boating Party. This iconic painting shows a woman holding her child while on a trip onto a lake in a rowing boat. Her husband is meanwhile rowing the boat. What is clear in the painting is that the main subject of Cassatt is the woman and her child. They are clearly facing us while we see only the back of the man. This focus was typical of most of the later works of Cassatt, where especially the relationship between mother and child was her topic.

The Boating Party is probably the most famous of Cassatt’s works. It was reproduced as a stamp by the US Postal Service in 1966, thus underlining the status of the work. The original painting can today be seen at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Meanwhile, Cassatt paintings have sold for upwards of USD 3 million. While that puts her below e.g. Monet in terms of price, it nevertheless puts her in the heavy weight class of painters, an important artist whose works and life still inspires. 

 

Houses of Parliament series

The Palace of Westminster was the subject of a series of paintings by French impressionist Claude Monet. He painted the home of the British parliament while staying in London. The whole series was painted between 1900 – 1904.

The paintings all share the same size and share a common viewpoint, namely Monet’s window at St. Thomas Hospital which overlooked the Thames. However, as was common in Monet’s serial works, the paintings were done under different lighting conditions, seasons and in different weather. Especially the lighting conditions we essential as these works are very much a study in the effects of light and how to depict it.

As opposed to earlier works, Monet had at this time stopped his previous practice of completing the work in front of the paintings subject. Instead, he would bring the paintings back for refinement in France, helped by fresh photographs from the London site. While he received some critique for this, he deemed it his own business how he decided to work. The final result, according to Monet, would be judged by the viewer.

The majority of the different works in the Houses of Parliament series can today be found in museums across Europe and the United States as well as many oil painting reproductions of these works.

The Art of Impressionism

Among the most received artistic stint in the world, Impressionism brought us many of the artists that are today classic names. From Monet and Cassatt to Degas and Pissarro, some of the true giants of the art world stamped their mark in the time of this period. Today, the works of the impressionists can be found at the museums around the world, on posters and postcards and, best of all, now also in accurately reproduced hand painted oil painting reproductions.



Impressionism was itself a 19th-century art movement which started out as a blurred association of Paris-based artists who came to prominence through a number of individualist exhibitions in the 1870s and 1880s. The name of the movement can be credited to one of the most famous and iconic images of the movement - Claude Monet’s work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant). It was not initially meant as a accolade, however. Instead, the work aggravated critic Louis Leroy to make up the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

The characteristics of Impressionist paintings include noticeable brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the absorption of movement as a crucial part of human cognition and self-knowledge, and unusual visual angles. Following its emergence as an art movement, these ideas soon found their way to analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.

Impressionism was proposed a radical movement at the time, as their activities broke the set rules of academia when it came to painting. They colored unconventionally, freely brushed and held primacy over line. They also carried away their art out of the studios and into the world. Where it had at one time been the code for painters of even landscapes to do such work indoors, the impressionists freely went into wide world in order to experience it and have it leave its impression on them. Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they portrayed overall visual effects instead of details. They used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed color, not smoothly amalgamated or shaded, as was customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense color vibration.

Impressionism initially came about in France. While there were at the time other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, and Winslow Homer in the United States, who were also at this time discovering the art of plein-air painting, the Impressionists improved new techniques for this purpose that were specific to the impressionist movement. Focusing on what its followers called a new and different way of seeing, it was an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of color. See the below art reproductions of impressionist paintings.



The initial public reaction to the impressionist movement was hostile. Clearly, this was not painting in the way of the famous masters and according to the set standards of the time. However, as does often happen, the public in time did come around, gradually seeing how the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not receive the agreement of the art critics and establishment. The ability of impressionism to re-create the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became a precursor seminal to various movements in painting which would follow, along with Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.