Woman with Pearl Necklace in Loge Mary Cassatt Postcard

Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge by Mary Cassatt, oil on canvas 1879, is a painting of a woman with bright, strawberry blonde hair in a white dress holding a decorated fan, seated in a large, deep red velvet chair in a balcony box at an opera house. In the background are the curving balcony seats and members of the audience with a massive chandelier hanging overhead. Cassatt paints the scene in deep, saturated colors of red, pink, and white with accents of yellow and gold. With bright white highlights on the subject’s pearls and dress and reflections across her face and costume, the artist captures the light, color, movement, and atmosphere of the opera scene in a slice of life moment from modern life. 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 colored 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 Armory Show of 1913.