The Art Institute of Chicago is hosting an exhibition titled Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism until January 3, 2027
Marking the centennial of Cassatt’s death, the exhibition features over 75 paintings.
Here are photos of a few of my favorites.
This oil painting by American Impressionist Mary Cassatt is titled The Child's Caress (c. 1891) It is on loan from the Honolulu Museum of Art.
The best part about exhibits like this is getting to see artwork that you have never had the opportunity to see before
This painting by is titled The Reading Lesson (c. 1901).
It shows a woman with a young girl i standing beside her, both engrossed in reading together.
Cassatt's theme is often of women and young children.
This oil painting by Mary Cassatt is titled Young Women Picking Fruit (c. 1892). It is on loan from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg Pennsylvania.
It's not often these in these days of mobile phones that you see anyone taking notes with a pencil and paper.
The painting that this man is taking a photo of is titled Jules Dried by His Mother (c. 1901)..
The Lost Chicago Mural
Modern Woman (1893), is widely considered one of the greatest mysteries in American art history.
In 1892, Chicago socialite and president of the Board of Lady Managers, Bertha Palmer, commissioned Mary Cassatt to paint a monumental mural for the south tympanum of the Hall of Honor in the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
The canvas was massive—roughly 14 feet high by 58–60 feet long. To execute a work on this scale at her country residence outside Paris, Cassatt had a special glass studio built with a trench in the floor so the canvas could be lowered or raised as she painted.
When the exposition closed in October 1893, the Woman's Building was slated for demolition. The canvas was taken down, rolled, and stored at the Palace of Fine Arts (now the Museum of Science and Industry).
Move to Storage (1895–1912): It was later transferred to the Hiram Sibley warehouse in Chicago. The mural was last documented in storage around 1912.
Because the canvas was painted in distemper/oil without standard framing and was handled under temporary conditions, it is widely believed to have deteriorated, been mislaid, or accidentally destroyed. No physical fragment of the actual mural is known to survive today.
The full composition survives through period black-and-white photographs and a single color print reproduction published in William Walton’s 1893 catalog Art and Architecture of the World’s Fair.
Cassatt created several related easel paintings, pastels, and prints exploring similar motifs around the same time.
In the current Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, a dedicated gallery/room recreates the "ghost" of this missing masterpiece through video installations, archive letters (including correspondence between Cassatt and Bertha Palmer), and period reproductions.
A mystery and a huge loss.
All photos are from my family albums
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