istic
knowledge and direction. In France she came to know the group of
painters including Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Degas, and especially
influenced by the work of Degas, she turned to him for the counsel she
needed, receiving it in generous measure. It was a fortunate choice, the
most fortunate possible, if she wished to combine in her art the
detached observation characteristic in general of the Impressionist
school with a passionate pursuit of all the subtlety, eloquence and
precision possible to pure line. The fruit of his influence is to be
found in the technical excellence of her representations of life, the
firmness and candor of her drawing, her competent management of planes
and surfaces, and the audacity with which she attacks difficult problems
of color and tone. The extreme gravity of her method is the natural
result of working under a master whose intensity and austerity in the
pursuit of artistic truth are perhaps unequaled in the history of modern
art.

Her choice of subject is not, however, the inspiration of any mind other
than her own. She has taken for the special field in which to exercise
her vigorous talent that provided by the various phases of the maternal
relation. Her wholesome young mothers with their animated children,
comely and strong, unite the charm of great expressiveness with that of
profoundly scientific execution. The attentive student of art is well
aware how easily the former quality unsupported by the latter may
degenerate into the cloying exhibition of sentiment, and is equally
aware of the sterility of the latter practised for itself alone. With
expressiveness for her goal and the means of rendering technical
problems for her preoccupation, Miss Cassatt has arrived at hard-earned
triumphs of accomplishment. One has only to turn from one of her
recently exhibited pictures to another painted ten or twelve years ago
to appreciate the length of the way she has come. The earlier painting,
an oil color, is of a woman in a striped purple, white, and green gown,
holding a half-naked child, who is engaged in bathing its own feet, with
the absorbed expression on its face common to children occupied with
such responsible tasks. The bricky flesh tints of the faces and hands,
and the greenish half-tones of the square little body are too highly
emphasized, but a keen perception of facts of surface and construction
is obvious in the well-defined planes of the child's anatomy, in the
foreshor