Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt is the most popular woman artist in the USA. She was born in 1845 in a town near Pittsburgh. She began her career at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied from 1861 until 1865. She studied in Paris, too.

Mary Cassatt began her career as a realistic painter. Later she started experimenting with light and colour. In 1877 Degas invited her to join the Impressionists. Mary Cassatt was the only American who exhibited with the French Impressionists. Cassatt took part in four of their exhibitions.

There was something of Manet and Renoir in her works, but she developed her own style. It shows influence of Japanese art.

Cassatt never married, never had children. But she expressed in her work a profound understanding of the mother and child relations. Womanhood and motherhood were her favourite subjects. Her treatment of these themes was characterized by tenderness. Yet her pictures are objective, direct and free from sentimentality. She sees children as individuals. Her famous canvas «Susan comforting the baby» shows a baby with a personality of her own.

Mary Cassatt’s achievements are great, if we think of the difficulties faced by women artists at the time. Edgar Degas wrote about her: «I am not willing to admit that a woman can draw that well».

THE TRETYAKOV ART GALLERY

One of the famous museums of Moscow is the Tretyakov Art Gallery. It is housed in a two-storey dark-red brick building in Lavrushinsky by-street. The central part of the building was designed at the beginning of the century by the painter Vasnetsov. The Gallery has collections of Russian and Soviet art. The museum was founded in 1856 by Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov. He had been collecting pictures for 40 years and had a rich collection of Russian paintings. They included works of Russian art of the 18th and the 19th centuries, outstanding works of his contemporaries. Beginning with the 1860s, he established a gallery of portraits of outstanding Russian scientists, writers and artists by such famous Russian painters as Vassily Perov. Nikolai Ghe, Ivan Kramskoy and Ilya Repin.

In 1872 Tretyakov built a special gallery for his collection, and in 1892 presented it to Moscow. There were 1,000 paintings and 500 drawings in his collection then.

The collection of the gallery reflects the history of Russian art, you can see icons of Rublev, portraits by Repin, Tropinin and Brullov, Russian landscapes by Shishkin, Savrassov and Levitan, genre pictures bv Fedotov, Pukirev and Repin, historical canvases by Surikov and many others, as well as sculptures. Outstanding artists of the whole multinational Russia represent rich cultural and art traditions of the country. Recently the gallery has been reconstructed. A lot of visitors can admire its canvases again. The gallery also holds exhibitions of Russian masters in its Exhibition Hall which is popular both among Muscovites and visitors to Moscow.