Women and children first

A lady licking an envelope. An intimate thing. It might be only the bill from the coal-man she’s paying, but it has the feel of something else: an assignation, a confession, an apology, a breaking-off. Would this woman in her deep-blue day dress and jacket be so unguarded if the artist had been a man? Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) was a femme sérieuse who painted women of quick wits and tender instincts. No grubby models, no ballet rats, no laundresses, no absinthe. Her sitters, you feel, would write a thank-you note, send flowers, recommend a dressmaker.

Mary Cassatt: An American Impressionist in Paris, at the Musée Jacquemart-André, is the first French exhibition to be dedicated to the Pittsburgh-born painter since her death. Cassatt moved to Paris from Philadelphia in 1865. She was an outsider twice over: a woman and an American. Still, she had taste, money, family, ambition, an apartment near the Place Pigalle and, after the success of the impressionist exhibitions, a château outside Paris. ‘What’s she got that we don’t?’ Camille Pissarro sulkily asked his son after visiting ‘Mlle Cassatt’ in April 1891. ‘Money, yes, just a bit of money.’

She was very much ‘Mlle Cassatt’. She never married, and after her sister Lydia died, never found another companion. But there is no one to beat her as a painter of mothers and children. Her subject was the ‘modern Madonna’. Instead of well-behaved Christ-childs waving benedictions, Cassatt’s babies squirm, wriggle, fidget, peel off their socks and blow burpy little raspberries. Her children have weight. She catches mothers shifting position because their cradling arm has gone dead.

Cassatt excels, too, at the shifting relationships between friends when one has a baby. A Japanese-inspired drypoint shows two women on an omnibus, one fussing and readjusting her bonneted daughter, utterly absorbed, the other looking out of the window.