1880
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery is a 1880 by Edgar Degas, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a woman in a black dress standing alone in a grand museum gallery, studying paintings on the wall. This is Mary Cassatt, a fellow artist and close friend of Degas. He sketched her here in 1879 while they planned a short-lived art journal together. The empty room feels quiet, like a private moment caught on paper. Degas often worked in monochrome—black, white, and gray—to focus on light and shadow, not color. Look up *chiaroscuro* to see how other artists used this same play of light and dark.
Degas and his friends Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro were all experimental printmakers who combined traditional printmaking techniques to create a black and white equivalent for the tonality and varied textures of paintings. They were all so involved in printmaking that in 1879–80 they planned to publish a journal, Le Jour et la nuit (Day and Night), that would contain original etchings. As a printmaker, Degas was ambivalent about when a plate was considered finished. What attracted him to printmaking was the variability. He thoroughly enjoyed reworking, retouching, and transforming…
The figure seated in the foreground is believed to be Mary Cassatt's sister, Lydia.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas on 19 July 1834 in Paris, Edgar Degas came from an affluent banking family with aristocratic roots and spent his childhood among the cultivated circles of the French capital.
See the richer artist page
