Mary Cassatt Paintings And Andrew Wyeth Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Mary Cassatt paintings often documented the social interactions among well-to-do women like herself. The activities they depicted fall within the boundaries of normal routines for her sex and class. These activities include tea drinking, theatre going and children tending.

The early Mary Cassatt paintings were masterpiece copies. In 1868, one of these portraits was selected at the prestigious Paris Salon. Paris Salon was an annual art exhibition ran by the French government. The well-received painting was submitted under the name of Mary Stevenson.

Mary Cassatt paintings shows Mary's dislike for narrative and her devotion to surface arrangement and color as well as to the most advanced artistic principles of her day. Mary is one of a few women, and the only American, to join a group of independent artists, later to be known as the Impressionists. Her invitation to the group came from Edgar Degas.

Going against the grain is a feature of Andrew Wyeth paintings. The early watercolors in Maine that constituted these paintings, are dismissed by the artist as being part of his blue sky period. Andrew Wyeth paintings are an epoch of art history showing a clear devotion to the abstract and the visually obtuse.

Andrew has always painted for himself and this is clearly evident in his Andrew Wyeth paintings. His brilliant Garret Room, showing the sleeping old black man Tom Clark, was produced in an impulse from the memory of a four year old Andrew, feeling anticipation and trepidation, in the middle of a Christmas night, with a stocking on his bed, containing a skinny doll stuck on its neck.

Andrew Wyeth paintings took a dramatic shift in 1945. The landscapes became more barren, the palettes muted and the occasional figures that appeared were enigmatic, poignant and sentimental. The death of Andrew's father was the cause of this shifting. The grief caused Andrew to focus intensely and paint with deep emotion going forward to the late 1940s.




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