Cup of Tea Mary Cassatt Postcard

The Cup of Tea by Mary Cassatt, oil on canvas 1880, is a painting of a woman in elegant white dress, long white gloves and large white hat seated in profile view in a plush, striped armchair, daintily holding a tea cup, spoon and saucer against a background of a raised container of blooming flowers. Cassatt paints the scene in loose, painterly brush strokes of oil colours in a range of rich tones from deep, velvet black to scintillating white, creating a relaxed vignette of the middle class woman enjoying life. Painted with great feeling for the character and warmth of the subject, the picture captures a fleeting moment in time in a scene from real life with portrait-like precision and grace. 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 coloured 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 Armoury Show of 1913.