It would serve no useful purpose to enumerate all the earlier women painters of the United States. They worked bravely and well, and if their doings are now forgotten or undervalued, it is only because the harvest sowed by them is being reaped by the present generation. To-day the names of at least two American women painters, Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux, are known in every country where good art is studied. Mary Cassatt, the only pupil of Degas, is bracketed always with Berthe Morisot, for both ladies became Impressionists at about the same time, adding the charm of their personalities to a rugged revolt in art. The work of each has great interest, but that of Mary Cassatt is the more attractive and the more enduring. It is not overburdened with a heavy adherence to methods originated by men; and it is richer with the emotions of the painter's own heart. To Mary Cassatt, Impressionism is a chosen dialect, a means by which she can express herself in colour and form; to Berthe Morisot, on the other hand, it was in itself the final word in painting. So, mistaking the clay of art for the finished statue, she obeyed the methods of a school with so much zeal and so much self-sacrifice that her own nature became enslaved to the difficulties of technique. Compare Berthe Morisot's able study (page 211) with the charming homeliness of Mary Cassatt's picture (page 157), and you will see at a glance how wide is the difference between the emotional and æsthetic value of the subjects represented. Berthe Morisot remains a student, while Mary Cassatt passes beyond technique to a universal delight in childhood. She feels both the pathos and the humour of the beginnings of our life, and she makes infancy welcome in art because she understands it and shows no maudlin sentiment.
Something of the same kind is done by Miss Cornelia Conant, in her domestic picture called "The End of the Story" (page 151); and another view of child-life, delightfully rendered by Helen Hyde, may be seen in colour on page 145.
The pictures by which Miss Cecilia Beaux is represented in this book show very clearly that her genius has dramatic strength, sustention, and flexibility. The portrait on page 182 is handled with a sculptural vigour that responds admirably to the character of the sitter, while the "Mother and Child" (page 121) has a quietness of tone, a reserved simplicity of style, a permeating suggestion of pathos, having much in common with Whistler's portrait of his mother. Miss Cecilia Beaux is a dramatist in her studies of character, and her art is probably more subtle and more various than that of any woman painter who has devoted her life to portraiture. The reader will do well to contrast her style with that of Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt, the first woman painter whose work was purchased by the Chantrey Fund, London (page 139).