Louise Elder Havemeyer and Weda Cook

          American born artists Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins were both born during the mid nineteenth century in Philadelphia and were fortunate enough to not have to rely on selling their work to generate income.  Cassatt and Eakins studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and eventually in Europe.  Mary Cassatt settled in France where she flourished artistically within the Impressionist movement while Thomas Eakins kept the United States as his primary residence. Both artists seemed to prefer the creation of portraiture in artistic endeavors. Cassatt and Eakins were similar in upbringing, opportunity, educational experience, and painterly content.  But the way the various subjects manifested in their work were a reflection of their experience of reality through a gendered lens.  Mary Cassatt charged her female figures with autonomy and celebrated the domestic domains traditionally relegated to women.  Thomas Eakins, to the contrary, pictured women as inactive passive characters that were objects of art.   While Cassatt and Eakins both chose to frankly illustrate their female sitters abandoning the method of beautifying their subjects, subtleties of execution illuminated their personal understanding and experience of the social construction of gender.

Mary Cassatt. Portrait of Louise Elder Havemeyer, ca. 1896

          Mary Cassatt's Portrait of Louise Elder Havemeyer, ca. 1896 depicts a suffragist and friend of Cassatt's.  Executed later in her career, this image mirrors the feminist social activism that Cassatt began to embrace and portray in her paintings.  Louise Elder Havemeyer is illustrated with her spine erect and gaze firmly directed at the observer.  Her hands powerfully grip the fabric of her garment and accessory.  As femininely decorous as her gown may be, it visually enhances the size of her form projecting a forthright and expansive femininity.  The subject's frontal orientation coupled with the volume of the adornment cannot be contained by the confines of the canvas and asserts the power of the sitter's character.  The depiction of Havemeyer's face in uncompromising in its realism and is unapologetic about flaws and age.  The manner in which her deep set eyes and broad forehead are painted deviate from the tendency to enhance the beauty of the sitter and rather an emphasis is placed on her inner strengths.  Clearly inspired by the Impressionist movement in France, Cassatt renders Louise Elder Havemeyer's image with a range of pastel colors that highlight brushstroke and color patches that glitter like specks of light.

Thomas Eakin.The Concert Singer (Weda Cook), 1892

          Thomas Eakin's The Concert Singer (Weda Cook), 1892 also illustrates a woman prominent in popular culture for her singing abilities.  Weda Cook is demonstrating her musical talents in this image but appears less active due the way her mannerisms and bodily posture are articulated.  Diagonally positioned and looking dreamily into an unknown space, Weda Cook is pictured as removed from her audience, disconnected from the music she is generating, and disengaged from the the viewer of the painting.  According to Linda Nochlin in Nineteenth Century Art A Critical Art History, "...Eakins interprets the female singer as the instrument of the music that flows forth from her rather than as a creator in her own right." (Nochlin 378).  The Concert Singer is a vessel of the musical vibrations that her vocal chords produce and the male ochestra conductor's hand issuing forth from the left hand corner imparts upon the audience that her talent can only be actualized through the tutelage and manipulation of a masculine counterpart.  Thomas Eakins illustrates his subject with no attempts of enhancing her physical appeal and remains steadfast to his devotion to realism.  Weda Cook is three dimensional and the utilization of modeling and chiaroscuro make this figure seem solid and life-like. The texture of her skin and the finish of her garment are commensurate visually with their existence in the organic world.
          Although similarities in Mary Cassatt's Louise Elder Havemeyer and Thomas Eakins' The Concert Singer exist in the broadest ways, for instance they are both portraits of females, the divergences in meaning are abundantly present.  Surely the fact that Mary Cassatt was a woman and understood the asymmetry of social and political power distributed among the sexes, motivated her to use art as a means to fill the women in her paintings with the qualities of humanity and assertiveness which were usually ascribed to men. Louise Elder Havemeyer portrays a powerful activist that does not exist for the viewing pleasure of men in the painting or in reality.  She was an accomplished individual with the noble pursuit of increasing the rights of women.  The manner in which Cassatt purposefully illustrated these qualities indicates an intention to provoke the questioning of traditional perceptions and manifestations of gender in art and the expression of it within  social arenas.  Thomas Eakins preferred to enforce these socially constructed notions of gender.  The Concert Singer embodies the characteristics that men have traditionally assigned to women: passive, easily manipulated, mentally stagnant, and most effective under the authority of a man.  Louise Elder Havemayer demands the viewer to respect an independently successful individual that sat before an artist and The Concert Singer insists that the woman pictured in its center lacks the ability to conduct herself separate from the assistance of a man and functions more adequately as a submissive item to be visually assessed.
          Mary Cassatt's expression of gender in her art work is disparate from Thomas Eakin's portrayal of men and women.  Mary Cassatt perceived the reality of her own gender through her own personal awareness of oppression and Thomas Eakins, born with the privileges that were attached to manhood, accepted gender normativity and the hierarchy that assumed men at its apex. Cassatt used her portraiture to promote the shift from women solely as objects in art to autonomous meaningful individuals and members of society.  Thomas Eakins used his artistic modality to affirm the belief that women should exist in the shadows of men and remain as objects to view in the visual arts.  Emerging in the art scene within the same social and historical contexts, Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins used their cultivated artistic skills to explore gender in ways that sharply contrasted each other.
          
          
Eisenman, Stephen F., Nineteenth Century Art A Critical History, Fourth Edition 2011. 
http://academics.smcvt.edu/shelburnemuseum/sestey/Louisine%20Elder%20Havemeyer.htm