Source: http://reynoldahouse.org/collections/object/madame-gaillard-and-her-daughter-marie-therese
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 20:37:28+00:00

Document:
Mary Cassatt met the Gaillard family, depicted in this pastel, through her friend Edgar Degas. Dr. Theodore Gaillard was an early patron of the French Impressionists and a collector of works by Renoir, Sisley, and Degas. Finding a sympathetic patron in Dr. Gaillard, Cassatt developed a friendship with the family and became a frequent house guest. In 1894, three years prior to completing this double portrait, Cassatt had completed a pastel of a six-year-old Marie-Thérèse.
In this intimate double portrait, Madame Gaillard and her daughter Marie-Thérèse sit close together. They are strikingly different physical types: Madame Gaillard is fair and auburn-haired, while her daughter has an olive complexion and long dark hair. They are elegantly dressed in dark gowns with fashionable puffed sleeves. Marie-Thérèse drapes her arm over her mother’s shoulder in an affectionate and casual gesture, gazing contemplatively at the viewer. Her mother, in contrast, gazes off into the distance with an unreadable expression—perhaps quiet sadness, perhaps simple introspection.
With her portraits, Cassatt aspired to do more than simply capture a likeness. Her experiments with color, form, and space were quite radical. In Madame Gaillard and Her Daughter Marie-Thérèse, Cassatt uses yellows and blues to create the highlights on their shiny black gowns, and blues and purples to suggest the shadows on their faces. The blocky forms in the background emphasize the flatness of the picture surface and reject a realistic recession into space, an effect which certainly owes something to Cassatt’s interest in Japanese prints. The result of these stylistic choices is a decorative surface pattern that enlivens the quiet scene.
Cassatt used an extraordinary variety of media in her work, from oils to pastels to gouache to watercolor to drypoint and aquatint, sometimes combining these media in innovative ways. A survey of her work in the 1890s reveals that, in addition to engaging in experiments in printmaking inspired by Japanese prints, Cassatt turned often to pastels in her portraits of mothers and children. Perhaps the immediacy of the medium appealed to her, as she could quickly capture the likenesses of her subjects while they sat for her. Her expert handling of the medium is revealed in the skill she demonstrates in her use of highlights and shadow.
When Barbara Babcock Millhouse, founding president of Reynolda House Museum of American Art, bought this pastel from Hirschl and Adler Galleries in New York in 1969, it was entitled Madame Meerson and Her Daughter. In 1997, Judith Barter and Kevin Sharp, curators at the Art Institute of Chicago, suggested that the sitters had been incorrectly identified and that the correct title for the painting should be Madame Gaillard and Her Daughter Marie-Thérèse.
The curators made the discovery as they were conducting research for the exhibition Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman at the Art Institute. Mr. Sharp knew of a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Gaillard that was coming up for sale at Christie’s and was struck by the resemblance of the sitter in that portrait to the young girl in Reynolda’s pastel. He contacted Reynolda House curators in April 1997, and they began the process of confirming the curators’ suspicions.
It is believed that mistake about the sitters’ identity happened in this way: In 1919, Cassatt’s Paris art dealer Joseph Durand-Ruel acquired this pastel (presumably from the Gaillards themselves) and wrote to the artist to request identification of the sitters. Cassatt identified them as Mme. Gaillard and her daughter. In 1920, Durand-Ruel sold the piece to a Madame Meerson under the title Mere et Jeune Fille (Mother and Young Girl). When it was sold in 1949 to a Morris Saffron, he mistakenly assumed that the previous owner of the painting, Madame Meerson, was the mother depicted. It was at this point that the erroneous title became affixed. The work was officially retitled in 1997.
In 1998, Madame Gaillard’s grandson, Philippe Remon, sent a photograph of his grandmother and his mother (Marie-Thérèse) to Reynolda House for our records. The similarity of the figures in the photograph to the sitters in the pastel is striking.
The daughter of a socially-prominent Pittsburgh broker, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) first studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1861 to 1865 before traveling extensively in Europe, often in pursuit of further formal instruction. She settled permanently in France in 1875; at various points, members of her wealthy family joined her on both temporary and permanent bases. As her mother and her sister suffered from ill-health, Cassatt was obliged from time to time to turn away from her work in order to oversee their care.
Unable to study at the École des Beaux-Arts because of her gender, Cassatt drifted away from traditional academic styles. More and more, she found herself drawn to a group of artists who came to be known as The Impressionists, a group that included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. The work of the Impressionists represented a departure from the careful draftsmanship, perspective, and modeling of the Academy, and critics responded to this new radical direction in art with both outrage and scorn. After suffering rejection from the Paris Salon, the annual state-supported exhibition juried by conservative French artists, Monet, Renoir, Degas, and others began exhibiting independently as a group in 1874. Their unconventional color choices, radical flattening of space, unorthodox compositions, abrupt cropping of objects, and subjects drawn from modern life shocked the public.
Invited by Degas, Cassatt joined the Impressionists in 1877 and exhibited with them from 1879 to 1886, when the group broke up. She was the only American and the only woman to exhibit with the French Impressionists. She was particularly influenced by the work of Degas; they developed a strong friendship marked by mutual admiration and sometimes heated exchanges about the nature of painting. Although Cassatt was quoted as saying that the “first sight of Degas’[s] pictures was the turning point in [her] artistic life,” she also described disagreements that led to long silences and eventual reconciliations (Barter, Judith A. Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1998, p. 109).
As a single woman, Cassatt was unable to frequent many of the cafés and nightclubs that her male counterparts depicted in their paintings. The painter primarily produced images of mothers and their children, often using family and friends, in fresh, modern, and seemingly unposed ways. She was extraordinarily talented at rendering children naturally, making them recognizable as children rather than miniature adults. Other than the mother-and-child images for which she is best-known, Cassatt concentrated her attention on modern leisure activities: couples boating, ladies attending the opera, and families enjoying the park.
There is a marked sense of spontaneity in Cassatt’s work: children casually yet charmingly sprawled in a chair, or a young woman whose face is hidden for a moment by her teacup. Cassatt’s avant-garde approach to composition also set her work apart; she often grouped objects close together and close to the picture plane, rather than spaced out in an even and orderly manner.
Cassatt’s work in the 1890s demonstrates the profound effects of her exposure to Japanese prints, which were at the time wildly in vogue in Paris. She herself collected Japanese woodblock prints and executed a series of prints with the muted colors and flat planes evident in the work of artists such as Hiroshige and Utamaro. She did not confine this sense of experimentation to printmaking, however; her paintings of the 1890s demonstrate a similarly innovative approach to the treatment of space, perspective, and color.
In 1893, Cassatt was invited to create a mural for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Cassatt’s mural, on the subject of “Modern Woman,” depicted girls in contemporary dress engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and the study of the arts. The mural was later either lost or destroyed.
Cassatt was plagued by illness in her later years; her failing eyesight was particularly disheartening. Cassatt died at her country home near Paris in 1926. Her fame and fine reputation as an artist, already firmly established at the time of her death, experienced a revival of interest in the 1960s and ’70s as scholars and artists began focusing more and more on the contributions of women to the development of modern art both in this country and abroad.
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 Letter from H&A 5/20/1997, info from Cassatt catalogue raisonné office.
 Reynolda House coversheet summaries, 1981 & 1997, object file.
 See note 2. Delacre Sale, Paris, 15 December 1941 (Cat. A.).
 Letter from A. D. Breeskin in 3/24/1970 states that Dr. Morris Saffron purchased the work at the 1952 Kende Sale. In a Memo dated May 24, 1977, from Dr. Saffron’s visit to Reynolda House, asserts that he owned the painting for 20 years, from 1949 to 1968. Copies in object file.
 Letter from M. P. Naud at Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., on May 20, 1997 stated that Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc. acquired the pastel from Dr. Saffron, copy in object file.
 Deed of gifts, 1975 & 1976, object file.

References: Art 9
 Art 35
 Art 8
 Art 43
 Art 22
 Art 65