Mary Cassatt
John Singer Sargent
1844 –1926
1856 –1925
Breakfast in Bed
Charles Stuart Forbes
ca. 1894
ca. 1882
Oil on canvas
Oil on canvas
Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation
83.8.6
Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation
83.8.43
Mary Cassatt was one of the first American women
to achieve international recognition as an artist. Born
in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, she spent most of
her life in France, where she became close friends
with the French Impressionists. Impressionists used
small brushstrokes to apply unmixed colors in order
to capture the immediate visual impression of a scene.
Cassatt was the only American to exhibit with the core
group of French Impressionists, including Edgar Degas,
Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille
Pissarro.
This lively study of the artist Charles Stuart Forbes
demonstrates Sargent’s masterful ability to capture his
subjects’ likenesses with a bold, economical use of the
brush; each stroke adds significantly to the composition.
The off-center placement of Forbes gives the work a
casual atmosphere, as though it were done spontaneously.
Sargent scratched the personal inscription “to my friend
Forbes” into the paint, which adds to the sense of
informality. The wall-mounted container above Forbes’s
left shoulder appears to contain paintbrushes, indicating
that the setting may be an artist’s studio.
In the 1880s Cassatt began depicting the subject that
absorbed her for the rest of her career: the motherand‑child pair. She often dealt with the tension between
a mother’s focused attention on her child and that
child’s desire to explore the world. In Breakfast in Bed,
the mother gazes at the child wrapped in her arms
while the child looks out into the room. By focusing
closely on the figures, Cassatt draws the viewer into the
intimate scene.
Charles Stuart Forbes, an American-born painter, met
Sargent in Paris during the 1880s. It was not uncommon
for Sargent to paint oil sketches of friends, which he then
gave to the subjects as gifts.
Cecilia Beaux
Thomas Eakins
1855 –1942
1844 –1916
Charles Wellford Leavitt, the Artist’s Cousin
David Wilson Jordan
1911
1899
Oil on canvas
Oil on canvas
Gift of Diana and Sidney Avery
2001.30
Purchased with funds from the
Virginia Steele Scott Foundation
99.27
Cecilia Beaux’s cousin Charles Leavitt was a successful
engineer. A pioneer in the field of city planning, he
developed plans for West Palm Beach, Florida, and
Wilmington, Delaware. In this portrait, Beaux depicted
Leavitt next to the tools of his trade, conveying a sense
of the sitter’s assured confidence through his direct gaze,
crossed arms, and calm demeanor.
When Beaux was an infant, her mother died and her
father, a French silk manufacturer, left his children
in the care of his Philadelphia in-laws. Aware of her
dependence, Beaux recognized the need to support
herself and worked hard to become a successful portrait
painter. Her seemingly effortless brushwork was often
compared to that of John Singer Sargent. In 1899,
William Merritt Chase declared Beaux “the greatest
woman painter of modern times.”
Thomas Eakins’s unconventional portrait of his friend
David Wilson Jordan is intimate, yet off-putting.
Eakins positioned Jordan close to the picture plane,
as if near the viewer. At the same time, Eakins posed
Jordan with his back turned to the viewer, as though
denying insight into his character. Such enigmatic
portraits became characteristic of Eakins’s work toward
the end of his career.
Eakins taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts from 1873 to 1886, when he was fired after
a series of scandals that included posing a nude male
model before a drawing class full of women. Jordan
studied with Eakins from 1879 until at least 1881 and
went on to become a well-known landscape painter.
John Singer Sargent
Bessie Potter Vonnoh
1856 –1925
1872 –1955
Mrs. William Playfair
Young Mother
1887
1896
Oil on canvas
Plaster
Purchased with funds from the
Virginia Steele Scott Foundation
98.2
Gift of MaryLou and George Boone
2007.9
Sargent’s masterful evocation of surfaces and textures—
here, of Mrs. William Playfair’s bejeweled gown,
feathered fan, fur-trimmed opera jacket, and dragonfly
hair ornament—explains why he became one of the
most sought-after portrait painters in turn-of-thecentury America and Europe. Although her costume
and jewels indicate a formal evening affair, Playfair
appears almost disarmingly relaxed, with her mouth
partly open as though about to speak. In Sargent’s
finest portraits, his subjects carry their wealth and
social status with an easy charm and grace.
Sargent exhibited this portrait of Playfair, who was the
wife of a prominent British obstetrician, at the Royal
Academy in London in 1887 and at the Paris Salon the
following year. Critical response was overwhelmingly
favorable: one writer called it “the finest piece of
painting in the Academy,” while another opined that it
was “the best of Mr. Sargent’s portraits.”
Both a work of art in itself and an essential component
of the casting process, this plaster version of Young
Mother is from the Roman Bronze Works, the New
York foundry that used it in creating bronze versions
of the sculpture. During this period, sculptors typically
modeled their works in clay, which was then cast into
plaster; it was from this plaster version that the final
bronze was made. The artist would carefully finish the
plaster prior to casting, since every detail would be
faithfully reproduced in the bronze. The original clay
model was generally destroyed in the process of casting,
leaving the plaster as the form closest to the hand of the
sculptor. At the foundry, the plaster received a protective
coating of shellac, which gives the piece its rich, warm
color. Vonnoh exhibited a plaster Young Mother at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1896–97 and
at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1898.
Bessie Potter Vonnoh
John Singer Sargent
1872 –1955
1856 –1925
Young Mother
Judgment of Paris
1899
1920 –22
Bronze
Sphinx and Chimaera
Purchased with funds from the Art Collectors’s Council
97.14
Modeled in 1896, when Bessie Potter Vonnoh lived in
Chicago, Young Mother was the first and most popular
of the artist’s many depictions of mothers and children.
Vonnoh’s choice of subject demonstrates her interest in
the work of Mary Cassatt, who typically painted women
and children. The sculpture, originally cast in plaster,
was widely exhibited and received critical acclaim for
its impressionistic handling of form and emotional
expressiveness. Young Mother was the first sculpture
Vonnoh had cast in bronze after moving to New York in
1898. This is an early example produced at the HenryBonnard Bronze Company, the foundry she used prior
to the Roman Bronze Works; the latter foundry used the
plaster Young Mother also on display here for its castings.
1916–21
Oil on canvas
Purchased with funds from the
Virginia Steele Scott Foundation and
Mr. and Mrs. Henry Spiro
99.1-2
Judgment of Paris (above left) and Sphinx and Chimaera
are studies for murals John Singer Sargent designed
for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For the project,
Sargent painted subjects from Greek mythology in order
to link the museum—a modern-day American palace
of culture built to resemble an ancient Greek or Roman
temple—with the birthplace of Western civilization.
Classical subjects also gave him the opportunity to
engage with masterpieces of Renaissance and Baroque
art, including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling,
which similarly portray the human body in complicated
poses and imbued with symbolic meaning.
In myth, the Sphinx and chimaera are evil beasts made
up of both human and animal parts. Sargent traveled to
Egypt to research subjects for his murals, and presumably
saw the Great Sphinx at Giza.
The Judgment of Paris portrays the Trojan hero Paris
awarding an apple to the most beautiful of the goddesses,
Aphrodite, while runners-up Hera (on the left) and
Athena (on the right) look on. The radical foreshortening
of Aphrodite as she leans toward the viewer lends drama
to the composition. Sargent chose not to use this subject
in the final mural.
Theodore Robinson
Childe Hassam
1852 –1896
1859 –1935
Nettie Reading
Paris Street Scene
ca. 1894
ca. 1889
Oil on canvas
Oil on board
Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation
83.8.41
Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation
83.8.21
After meeting Claude Monet in 1888, Theodore
Robinson began using the French Impressionist’s
methods: applying small brushstrokes of unmixed color
to build the illusion of form. The bright “flowers” in
the background are simply tiny spots of pure color, and
dabs of white paint convey the sun’s dappling the tree
branches and the woman reading. Through his subtle
use of greens, Robinson captured the effect of subdued
sunlight. This intimate scene is most likely set near the
seashore in Cos Cob, Connecticut, where Robinson spent
the summer of 1894.
In painting this scene of Paris, Childe Hassam took
the point of view of a flâneur, a person who makes
keen observations of the urban environment. Hassam
recorded the vibrant interplay of colors, shapes, and
textures on an otherwise undistinguished Parisian
street corner on a rainy day. Rounding the corner, a
well-dressed woman shelters herself and a child with an
umbrella, while in the distance a fiacre, or horse-drawn
cab, moves down the street.
Robinson’s subject—a woman enjoying a leisure
activity—is typical of his work and that of the French
Impressionists. Unlike his European colleagues, however,
Robinson composed his paintings with a strong sense
of structure, here created by the tree branches that
diagonally bisect the painting.
From 1886 to 1889 Hassam lived in Paris, where
he became interested in the work of Édouard
Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and the other French
Impressionists. Paris Street Scene is characteristic of
Hassam’s work after he arrived in France, when he
concentrated on capturing fleeting moments in time
and atmospheric effects.
Thomas Eakins
1844 –1916
Riter Fitzgerald
ca. 1895
Oil on canvas
Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation
83.8.14
Thomas Eakins often portrayed professional men—
including doctors, clergymen, professors, and
scientists—deep in thought, a pose befitting people
who worked with their minds as much as their hands.
Journalist Riter Fitzgerald, a Philadelphia art critic and
friend of Eakins, is shown sitting in an easy chair with
a book in his lap, his head raised as if contemplating
something he has just read.
This oil sketch is a study for a large portrait of Riter
Fitzgerald that Eakins painted in 1895 (now at the
Art Institute of Chicago). He gave this version to
Fitzgerald’s sister, a gesture that reflected the warm
friendship he had with the critic’s family. Fitzgerald, for
his part, was a staunch advocate of Eakins’s work. Of
this painting, Fitzgerald quipped, “it is undoubtedly
one of the finest portraits Eakins ever painted.”