FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Leslie Wright
Director of Advancement
lwright@shelburnemuseum.org
802-985-0880
SHELBURNE MUSEUM PRESENTS A VIRTUAL EXHIBITION OPENING –
MARY CASSATT’S IMPRESSIONS: ASSEMBLING THE HAVEMEYER ART COLLECTION
SHELBURNE, Vt. (April 22, 2021)—Shelburne Museum presents a virtual exhibition opening Mary Cassatt’s Impressions: Assembling the Havemeyer Art Collection on Thursday, April 29 at 6 p.m. Join Shelburne Museum Associate Curator Carolyn Bauer and renowned art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews for the presentation “Cassatt/Havemeyer: Art, Collecting, and Social Influencing.” This free webinar highlights the online exhibition and examines the close and creative relationship between American Impressionist Mary Cassatt and the Havemeyer Family.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844-1926) is unquestionably one of the most highly recognized Impressionist artists. Celebrated, both today and during her time, she created a prolific body of work—paintings, pastel drawings, and prints—while living abroad in France, often capturing the private, domestic lives of women in this new painterly, modern, and emotive style. Cassatt’s lesser-known role came as fine arts advisor to her friends and family. For more than 50 years, Cassatt expended significant energy cultivating a new market for Impressionism and securing a place for these works of art in collections across the globe. While Cassatt advised numerous collectors —from her family members to captains of industry—her good friends, Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer (1855-1929) and Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847-1907), were her constant, primary, and most inquisitive clients.
Today, the majority of the Havemeyer’s collection resides at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; however, many of its gems were inherited by their youngest daughter, and Shelburne Museum founder, Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960), and are now part of Shelburne Museum’s permanent collection.
The online exhibition Mary Cassatt’s Impressions: Assembling the Havemeyer Art Collection explores the enduring friendship between Cassatt and the Havemeyers and highlights archival anecdotes and primary sources detailing their acquisitions of Impressionist paintings, drawings, and sculptures based on Cassatt’s advice.
To register for the webinar, please visit https://shelburnemuseum.org/event/virtual-exhibition-opening-mary-cassatts-impressions/
About Nancy Mowll Mathews
Art historian, curator and author, Nancy Mowll Mathews is – Emerita Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th– and 20th-century Art at the Williams College Museum of Art. Of the more than 15 books and exhibitions she has produced, she is best known for Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, Cassatt: The Color Prints, and Mary Cassatt: A Life.
Image credit: Mary Cassatt, Mary Cassatt (American, 1844-1926), Louisine Havemeyer and her Daughter Electra, 1895, Pastel on wove paper, 24 x 30 1/2 in. Museum purchase, 1996-46
About Shelburne Museum
Founded in 1947 by pioneering folk art collector Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, is the largest art and history museum in northern New England and Vermont’s foremost public resource for visual art and material culture. The Museum’s 45-acre campus is comprised of 39 buildings including the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education and Webb Gallery featuring important American paintings by Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Grandma Moses, John Singleton Copley and many more. For more information, please visit shelburnemuseum.org.
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