Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery

Among other works on paper by Degas in the AMAM collection is the etching and aquatint Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery, of 1879-80, which was a gift of Oberlin professor Ellen Johnson. The Impressionists looked for accident and random cutting off of forms but few captured compositions in so radical a way as Degas did in his rendering of his friend Mary Cassatt.

Here, Degas may have been inspired by photography (he was a photographer himself), or by Japanese woodcuts (he owned a sizeable collection of them). Although he did not adopt the picturesque Japanese motifs and ornament, he was intimately familiar with and used the compositional arrangement of Japanese prints in his work. Closely cropped at the edges, Mary Cassatt is shown in a tightly enclosed space with the figures viewed from a slightly elevated position, reminiscent of Japanese pillar prints that were designed in a narrow vertical format.

The absorption on his friend's face as she studies her book, and the narrow vertical format that abruptly cuts off the figures, are evocative of the experimental "snapshot" aesthetic of Degas's printmaking.