The Parrot

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was one of three women (along with Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond), and the only American artist, to exhibit with the Impressionists. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she initially studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (which then excluded women from life drawing classes) and moved to Paris in 1865, where she trained with several artists including the leading academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. With the exception of a return to the States during the Franco-Prussian War and brief sojourns in Spain and Italy, she would remain in France for much of the remainder of her life and career. Her work met with a cool reception at the Paris Salon. In 1877, she struck up a friendship with Edgar Degas and, at his invitation, joined the group of artists soon to be known as the Impressionists, first exhibiting with them in 1879. Cassatt first began making prints around 1878, encouraged by Degas. Over a period of about 30 years, before failing eyesight curtailed her career as a graphic artist, she created a body of some 250 prints. Formally inventive and technically highly experimental, Cassatt’s prints stand as arguably the most innovative part of her oeuvre. While the extraordinary series of colour aquatints she produced in 1890-91 remains her best known set of prints, her engagement with drypoint and etching is no less central to her work as a printmaker. 'The Parrot', made around 1891, depicts a typical subject – a seated woman (according to Adelyn Breeskin, the artist’s maid and companion Mathilde) whose enigmatic expression may indicate pensiveness or melancholy – with an unusual adjunct, the parrot (probably a yellow-headed Amazon, Amazona ochrocephala oratrix) perched on her hand. Cassatt’s bold and skilful use of drypoint, a technique she prized for its kinship with drawing, is in evidence, with delicate detail lavished on the woman’s head, hands and upper body, while her skirt and chair are rendered with great economy. This impression, on a light blue paper, is a proof of an unrecorded early state; Cassatt’s zeal for experimentation led her to produce multiple, and often strikingly varied, states of many of her prints.

Ambroise Vollard (Cassatt’s principle dealer and patron) (1866-1939); bought from him by Henri Marie Petiet (1894-1980); from whom bought by the current owner

From the Baroque to Today: New Acquisitions of Works on Paper, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 23/02/2024-27/05/2024

Breeskin, Adelyn Dohme, Mary Cassatt: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Graphic Work, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979
cat. no. 138