Williams Family Summer III: Mary Cassatt, Tumors in Jars, and a Close Encounter of the Wild Kind

Two (gloriously full) days in Philadelphia

Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878). Image in Public Domain

A week ago, we took a family trip to Philadelphia! The main goal for taking this trip right now was for me to see the exhibit on Mary Cassatt at Work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibit will decamp across the country to San Francisco after September 8th, so there was a sense of urgency in squeezing in this trip now.

But we did a lot more than that in our two days in Philly. This story also involves pickled tumors and brain slices in jars, a rogue mouse encounter, a whole lot of constitutional history, and the best little tart I’ve ever had.

Mary Cassatt at Work

Mary Cassatt’s paintings perhaps need no introduction. Chances are, you’ve come across them without even realizing who the artist is. Think of a tired girl sprawled out in a massive blue armchair. Or pudgy toddlers playing on the beach. Or a mother tenderly nuzzling a tired baby.

Mary Cassatt, Maternal Kiss (1896). Image: Public Domain

Who was this artist? You might expect, given her choice of subjects, that she was a devoted mother who just delighted in children and used her painting to express her love of the domestic sphere, the wonders of childhood, the tender beauty of motherhood.

You would be wrong. Mostly.

While Cassatt, born in Allegheny, PA in 1844, clearly did see something special in children and the domestic sphere, she herself chose to never get married—a relative anomaly for an aristocratic woman of her generation. She never had children. But she chose to paint them—mostly them, in fact.

This enigma of Cassatt is what I had hoped to untangle a bit through this exhibit—indeed, by organizing it around the theme of Cassatt at work, the curators clearly had a similar goal in mind. The exhibit notes make it clear that the curators wanted to complicate the idea of Cassatt’s paintings as tenderly celebrating children and motherhood through showing how Cassatt thought about her own work and that of others. Work is hard. This includes the work of child-rearing and the work of painting.

Cassatt’s letters and other writings (displayed in the first room of the exhibit along with some of her earliest work) make it clear what she thought of her own work: she adored it, embracing its very intense labor with glee, and only regretting later in life that her body wouldn’t allow her to push herself quite so hard anymore. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Cassatt was married—to her art.

So what did she think of the labor of others, especially the labor of caring for children—that work that she painted more than any others, even while deliberately choosing to bypass it? She certainly emphasized the physical labor aspect—shown, for instance, by the reddened hands of women bathing babies and toddlers or holding tired children in poses that must have been very uncomfortable for the adult.

And then there was this bombshell revelation: Many of Cassatt’s paintings that, I always thought, were of mothers with their children, were rather of paid models she had hired to pose with various children she knew, perhaps the children of neighbors. In some cases, furthermore, the women she painted with the children were the children’s caretakers, not their mothers.

How does this knowledge change our perspective of Cassatt and her view of children and the work of the home? Does it mean that these paintings, so tender in capturing those loving glances of mothers and babies, are all a lie?

The exhibit notes suggested that this knowledge should challenge our desire to read tenderness into Cassatt’s paintings. Instead, they suggested, we should see Cassatt’s fascination with the hard work aspect of life, including in all things to do with taking care of children.

But this approach assumes that any display of hard work is a condemnation of such effort on the part of the artist. Is this really the case? In some ways, Cassatt’s Impressionism is fitting for this dreamlike state of affairs that we see latent in the work of care—each painting is just a little blurry, the faces especially of adults just a little out of focus. To take care of the vulnerable, the caretakers themselves must erase themselves just a little bit. They blur, while the children come into focus. But, again, does all of this mean Cassatt disapproved of such work of care?

I wondered, seeing in person these famous paintings, the emotions so eloquent in them, could it not be a both/and rather than either/or? After all, the reason so many mothers have related to Cassatt’s paintings so readily over the past century or more is precisely because we feel seen and understood when looking at them. Motherhood is lovely. It’s also hard and self-sacrificial, self-blurring.

For that is the nature of motherhood as an art—and Cassatt captured this well. Everything in this life, motherhood and art alike, is hard and physical and profoundly emotional all at once—it exhausts us, takes something from our bodies and minds, leaving us weakened and (literally) scarred. But isn’t it also a delight?

It is worthy of painting over and over again, because it is so beautiful in a transcendent way. Cassatt knew this.

Brief Notes on All the Rest

While my little girl and I took in the Cassatt exhibit, the guys spent the morning at the Mütter Museum. For weeks before our trip, the nine-year-old has been telling everyone how much he was looking forward to seeing Grover Cleveland’s cancerous jaw (it’s a wonder we still have friends).

His expectations were greatly exceeded, for in addition to the cancerous tumor in question, he and Dan got to see a slice of Einstein’s brain, and many, many more tumors, teeth, skulls and other body parts—and a few entire bodies or skeletons—of different people.

An announcement at the entrance proclaimed the museum’s prohibition on all photography “out of respect” for those on display. But, Dan wondered at the end, isn’t all respect gone already in the mere existence of such a museum? This is an apt question to ask. We are a long way removed from the days of “freak shows,” to which the displays in this museum readily nod. Except, are we?

Late that night, as Dan and I quietly talked, processing our day in the hotel room as the kids were peacefully sleeping, I saw something in my peripheral vision, scuttle across the carpet and dart under the fridge. “It’s a roach!!!” I whisper-screamed to Dan, who knew his duties for such times as these.

But as the presumed roach made several more darting laps around the refrigerator, a horrifying truth became apparent: it had a tail. There was, I shudder to report, a mouse in the house.

On the 8th floor.

In a fairly nice and perfectly clean city hotel.

I guess sometimes in life, rodents just happen.

As we tried to figure out what to do about it—should we ask to be moved to another room?—the mouse darted out from under the fridge one last time, squeezed under the room’s door with no trouble at all, and was off and away. And so, we moved everything up from the floor and continued with our stay.

The next morning, we visited the Liberty Bell and the Constitutional History Museum. The museum was outstanding and had something for all ages. Even the five-year-old, whose knowledge of history is, well, what you might expect for her age, was intrigued. She particularly loved a little corner on archaeology as the study of other people’s trash. And you know what? That’s not a bad takeaway to learn from a museum visit.

But I will end with the unexpected surprise of this trip. The tart.

You see, half-way through our day at the museum, after hours of wandering around the Cassatt exhibit and delighting over the tired girls in paintings there, I took my own tired little girl to the cafeteria for lunch. Since the guys were on their own adventure that morning (see above), this was very much a girls lunch. Light on protein, heavy on carbs, and especially dessert.

And that is how it transpired that we split a little brown-butter tart.

It was the sort of thing that you enjoy in silence that verges on the sacred, a trance-like state. And then, when it’s gone, you sigh and reluctantly break the silence a few minutes later, only to say, as my sweet girl did, “oh, dear. I think I need another one.”