Mary Cassatt with Small Dog and The Yellow Wallpaper

8:00 AM

Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt with Small Dog, 1890
Though her career as an artist started with little support, Mary Cassatt searched to create art in a different light than what her schooling in Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts gave her. After traveling Europe and expanding her skills, she became intrigued by Edgar Degas and his compelling impressionist paintings. His inspiration fed her and helped develop a close relationship between the two.
 
This portrait of Cassatt displays her lonesome and in an isolated bedroom, much like the setting of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's haunting story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." Cassatt's gloomy expression, as well as her dress, fixes the mood on her wanting out of this space. "The Yellow Wallpaper" sets the same stage with the woman originally feeling trapped in the nursery before the wallpaper consumes her mind. Cassatt's expression also appears calmed by the dog, much like the woman is calmed by John, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction," the narrator writes.

The dull colors Degas uses match with the masking of Cassatt's face and provide the picture with serious levels of discomfort. The colors described in "The Yellow Wallpaper" create a similar feeling, as they are "repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."

Share This Story

Tags: , , ,

You Might Also Like

0 comments