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Art in a Mirror: The Counterproofs of Mary Cassatt

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2004 by Pamela A. Ivinski

Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed something a bit strange about a number of the illustrations for this article: they appear to have been printed in reverse. If you carefully examine the lower left corner of Plate II, The Banjo Lesson, you will find the work is signed "Mary Cassatt"--but backwards. If you were able to see the picture in person, you would discover that the signature does in fact read backwards. That is because the artworks featured in this article (except for Pls. I and VI) are actually counterproofs (reverse impressions) of pastels by the American-born impressionist artist Mary Cassatt. Forty-eight counterproofs never before displayed publicly are featured in an exhibition currently on view at Adelson Galleries in New York City. (1) Among other revelations, the exhibition includes seven compositions that will be new to even the most enthusiastic Cassatt admirer, for they were made from unrecorded pastels.

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The counterproof process has rarely been studied as a discrete area, and little attention has been paid to the counterproofs of Cassatt's pastels. A counterproof is created by placing a damp sheet of blank paper over an artwork, such as a pastel or a not-yet-dry etching, and applying pressure, usually by running the sheets through a printing press. The pressure causes a mirror impression of the original image to be transferred to the moistened paper: Thus, the damp sheet that was laid over and pressed against Cassatt's pastel The Banjo Lesson (Pl. I) became imprinted with the counterproof image that is now the work illustrated as Plate II. Surprisingly, more than one counterproof can be pulled from a single work, as with Plates III and IV, both reverse impressions of the Cassatt pastel entitled Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 2), last known to be in a private collection. Moreover, it is often difficult to tell that a counterproof was taken from a pastel, because to the untutored eye the original pastel's surface remains largely unaffected. (2)

The counterproof process has long been employed by printmakers, for the reversed image that results is useful for comparison with the preparatory drawing or plate from which a print is being made. Eventually, some artists began to hand color counterproofs of engravings after their works. In the case of the German artist-naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), for example, these handtinted counterproofs quite closely resemble her delicate watercolors of flowers. (3) Other artists also made counterproofs of their chalk drawings and pastels as well as paintings in watercolor and gouache. During the rococo period in France, many painters, including Jean Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) and Francois Boucher (1703-1770), experimented with chalk drawings, pulling counterproof impressions and at times reworking them with chalk additions.

Through the first half of the nineteenth century, however, painters who aspired to the highest levels in France were discouraged both from working with the chalks and pastels explored by rococo artists and from making prints. This began to change in the early 1860s, at the same moment that Cassatt was beginning her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1862 the French art dealer Alfred Cadart (1828-1875) collaborated with the printer Auguste Delatre (1822-1907) to form the Societe des aquafortistes (Society of Etchers) in Paris, with the aim of reviving the concept of original prints by painters. (4) Cadart published original etchings by many of the best painters of the period, such as Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875), Edouard Manet (1832-1883), and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). In a similar vein, the Societe des Pastellistes was organized in Paris in 1870, seeking to bring that largely forgotten medium back to prominence.

By the mid-1870s in France, etching and pastels had begun to flourish in an artistic climate that also saw the formation of the impressionists as a group. When Cassatt was asked to join these renegade artists, around 1877, she had already rejected the dark-toned and tightly painted style promoted by the Academie des beaux-arts in favor of the light-filled and spontaneously brushed renderings of modern life also preferred by her new colleagues. In the late 1870s she began to investigate etching, spurred on by her friend and fellow impressionist Edgar Degas (1834-1917), who intended to publish a new journal featuring his prints alongside Cassatt's and those of another impressionist, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). (5) Although the journal never came to fruition, Cassatt went on to create a number of innovative prints over the next few years, while also playing an important part in reestablishing pastel as a serious medium for artists.

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After the dissolution of the impressionist group in 1886, Cassatt immersed herself in printmaking with renewed vigor, and completed a group of exquisite drypoint etchings in the late 1880s that were described by critics as "precise and supple" and evincing "a distinguished simplicity of manner." (6) She exhibited these drypoints with another new group of artists, the Societe des Peintres-Graveurs, whose members, patrons, and critical supporters were devoted to expanding the technical parameters of, as well as the audience for, original prints by painter-printmakers. In 1890, inspired by the extensive temporary exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints at the Ecole des beaux-arts in Paris, Cassatt undertook an ambitious series of color prints. The result, popularly known as the "Set of Ten," was not only one of the first examples of color etching of the era but remains enshrined as one of the greatest accomplishments of nineteenth-century graphic art. (7) Indeed, when this series was shown in New York in 1895, the critic Montague Marks (b. 1847) declared, "We do not hesitate to say that these prints will be reckoned among the most artistic of the century." (8)

Art in a Mirror: The Counterproofs of Mary Cassatt

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2004 by Pamela A. Ivinski

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