"When you look through the eyes of another": Mary and Lydia Cassatt in art, life, and fiction

• Autores: Teresa Casal
• Localización: Relational designs in literature and the arts: page and stage, canvas and screen / Rui Carvalho Homem (ed. lit.), 2012, ISBN 978-90-420-3581-2, págs. 333-348
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper focuses on the interplay between fiction, biography, and act history as it is rendered in Harrier Scott Chessman's novel "Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper" (2001), itself part of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century multifaceted responses to the art and life of women Impressionists.

    Chessman recreates the relation between the American painter Mary Cassatt and her older sister Lydia, who poses for Mary at a time when she is increasingly debilitated by the disease that would lead to her premature death. The novel, which stages a dialogue between Mary's gaze and Lydia's voice, is structured in five chapters, each corresponding to a particular painting and inviting us into the scene and the various interactions attending its composition. By stepping imaginatively into Cassatt's pictorial scenes through the voice of the unknown sister, the novelist replicates the close-up point of view adopted in Cassatt's figure painting so as to engage both with Cassatt's tlfe and art. This study examines Chessman's fictional rendering of the relationship between the painter and the model, as well as between fleeting life and the artistic attempt to arrest it, and considers how the novel addresses the limits and possibilities of word and image to capture life as it is perceived in the face of death.