Mary Cassatt (1844-1926): advising against convention

Abstract

American artist, Mary Cassatt became an advisor when she joined the Impressionists and by the 1890s, she as a celebrated advisor, who worked with elite Gilded Age collectors like the Havemeyer's of New York, the Palmers of Chicago, the Sears of Boston, and others. Anchored in market-based and epistolary research, this thesis will examine Cassatt's advising career and her graphic work. Cassatt taught her clients to value artworks that included both stylistic elements comfortable to American taste and unfamiliar modernist tropes. As an advisor, Cassatt educated her clients to acquire works which were hybrid in nature and borrowed stylistic qualities from accepted artwork and from modernist esthetics. The addition of these in-between works to American collections primed American taste to incrementally accept modernism, realism, and the avant-garde into Gilded Age collections. Cassatt's impact on her clients' collections shaped American collecting habits and the collections of American national museums.