Girl in the Garden by Mary Cassatt Poster

Girl in the Garden by Mary Cassatt, oil on canvas 1880-1882, is a painting of a young woman in white dress seated and knitting in a garden, staring intently at the fabric in her hands. Behind her is a deep green garden with plants, a small tree and diagonal garden wall. Cassatt paints the subject as a symphony of pale white tones, monumentally silhouetted against the darker green of garden plants and flowers, in thinly applied, painterly brush strokes that evoke the effects of watercolor. Cassatt contrasts the tranquil calm of the girl, seated in a nearly classical pose, to the dynamic movement of the diagonal background. Cassatt first showed the painting in one of the original Impressionist painting exhibitions in Paris, to which her friend Degas invited her. Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844 - 1926) was an American painter and printmaker who became an important member of the French Impressionist movement of art. Born in Pennsylvania, Cassatt studied abroad in Europe as a young woman, where she began her first studies in art. Dedicating herself to art, she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, until she moved to Paris in 1866 to study with Jean-Leon Gerome of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and became a copyist in the Louvre. By 1874 Cassatt had a studio in Paris but struggled to exhibit in the official French Salon, until Edgar Degas invited her to join the Impressionist exhibitions. Degas tremendously influenced Cassatt, about whom he wittily remarked "No woman has the right to draw like that", and the two artists had a close working relationship for years as Mary absorbed Degas' drawing, composition, and mastery of the mediums of pastel and etching. Cassatt posed for a number of paintings by the elder artist, and created her own unsentimental, rigorously drawn figure paintings of scenes from modern life, notably many paintings on the theme of mother and child. Her series of highly original coloured prints in etching and aquatint are an unsurpassed landmark in the history of art, influenced by the elegance of classical Japanese printmakers. An early feminist and supporter of women's suffrage, Cassatt painted prolifically until well into old age, exhibiting at the notorious American Armoury Show of 1913.