Woman and Girl Driving Mary Cassatt Postcard

A Woman and a Girl Driving by Mary Cassatt, oil on canvas 1881, is a painting of a horse-drawn buggy driven by a woman in an elegant dress and hat staring intently at the road ahead while gripping the reins of the horse. Beside her is a little girl in a white dress and hat holding on to the rail, while a gentleman in black suit and top hat sits behind them, seated in the opposite direction. The background is a panorama of dense forest of dark brown tree trunks. Cassatt paints the scene in a rich range of tonal colours from deep, velvet black through rich browns to powerfully scintillating whites, with flattened forms and stark contrasts of light and dark in a manner reminiscent of Manet. Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844 - 1926) was an American painter and printmaker who became an important member of the French Impressionist movement of art. Born in Pennsylvania, Cassatt studied abroad in Europe as a young woman, where she began her first studies in art. Dedicating herself to art, she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, until she moved to Paris in 1866 to study with Jean-Leon Gerome of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and became a copyist in the Louvre. By 1874 Cassatt had a studio in Paris but struggled to exhibit in the official French Salon, until Edgar Degas invited her to join the Impressionist exhibitions. Degas tremendously influenced Cassatt, about whom he wittily remarked "No woman has the right to draw like that", and the two artists had a close working relationship for years as Mary absorbed Degas' drawing, composition, and mastery of the mediums of pastel and etching. Cassatt posed for a number of paintings by the elder artist, and created her own unsentimental, rigorously drawn figure paintings of scenes from modern life, notably many paintings on the theme of mother and child. Her series of highly original coloured prints in etching and aquatint are an unsurpassed landmark in the history of art, influenced by the elegance of classical Japanese printmakers. An early feminist and supporter of women's suffrage, Cassatt painted prolifically until well into old age, exhibiting at the notorious American Armoury Show of 1913.