CAS AH 287 Lecture Notes - Lecture 29: Thomas Couture, Camille Pissarro, Le Figaro
16 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Little girl in blue armchair: expresses boredom and a rebellion against good manners. Device of cutting off the room near the bottom of the windows replicates the limited view the chid has of the room. In little girl in a blue armchair, mary cassatt demonstrates her powers of observation in showing her young subject sprawled in a large, blue armchair. T he smartly dressed little girl fidgets; in the next chair is her sleeping dog. The girl"s pose has the naturalism of childhood that would later characterize many of cassatt"s paintings of children. Pictorial structure and clarity are the foundation of cassatt"s art. Under edgar degas" tutelage, she began to collect and study japanese prints; their patterns and asymmetric designs greatly influenced her work. Here she placed the girl, the focus of the composition, off-center. The armchairs form a pattern encircling an oddly shaped patch of gray floor in the middle of the picture.
