Tea at Trianon: The Tumultuous Friendship Between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

The Tumultuous Friendship Between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas

From ArtNet:

In 1875, Mary Cassatt was strolling along Boulevard Haussmann when a pastel drawing in a shop window caught her attention. “It changed my life,” the American expatriate would later say. “I saw art then as I wanted to see it.” The pastel was by Edgar Degas, already a prominent figure in the Parisian art scene, and all the more so following his part in the debut Impressionist exhibition a year earlier.

Cassatt was no slouch herself. Barred from enrolling in the École des Beaux-Arts, she’d been taught privately by its masters on-and-off since arriving in the French capital in 1866, although the Franco-Prussian War got in the way. By 1875, she had exhibited five times at the Paris Salon. As chance would have it, Degas had admired Cassatt’s 1874 entry, an oil painting depicting enigmatic woman wrapped in a green-gold shawl, and is said to have told the artist Joseph-Gabriel Tourny, “here is someone who feels as I do.”

His intuition was correct: in 1877, Tourny introduced the two, thereby launching a fast and intense friendship. Despite a 10-year age gap and having grown up on different continents, the pair had much in common. Both came from affluent banking families, both were unmarried, and, most importantly, both were hungry to explore a new type of painting. (Read more.)