9th November, 2024

Ms Áine Andrews, practicing painter and batik artist:

‘Mary Cassatt, a Radical American Impressionist in Paris’

One of the so-called Trois Grandes Dames (‘the three great ladies’) of Impressionism, Mary Cassatt is France’s forgotten artist. One of only three women, she was also the only American, ever to join the French Impressionists.

This determined and inquisitive artist was a feminist and an influential intellectual personality of her time. Pivotal to the success of the Impressionist artists it was she who guided purchases of their works by rich American collectors, on condition that they promise to leave their treasures to museums.

Louisine Waldron Elder was still a teenager when Cassatt persuaded her to buy a pastel by Degas. At Cassatt’s urging she then borrowed pocket money from her sisters to purchase works by Monet and Pissarro. Later, Louisine and her husband, the sugar millionaire Henry Havemeyer, left their fabulous collection to the Metropolitan Museum in new York.

Even more importantly Cassatt supported the Parisian art collector Paul Durand-Ruel, after the financial crash in France in the 1880s, when he risked all by opening a gallery in New York. Durand-Ruel promoted her artwork and she introduced him to the buyers. Together they shaped a taste for Impressionism in the United States, making it one of the most famous movements in the history of art.

Áine Andrews is a practicing artist specialising in painting and batik. Since 2017 she has been presenting a series of lectures on Art Appreciation. Based on the idea of a visit to an art gallery in Ireland or abroad she examines one painting in detail at each lecture. Together with her audience she will explore the work itself, its historical context, as well as links to society of the time and the sometimes, fascinating journey of the painting to its present location.

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