There is probably no child—and certainly no girl—who better and more viscerally captures the true feeling of their age than the title figure of Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1877–78). Sitting slumped, with legs akimbo, she expresses all the bored insouciance of a girl dressed up in a bothersome white dress who is tired of being told to look nice, sit up straight, be agreeable, behave. She is paired with a small dog companion in an adjoining armchair who reflects a similar cushion-bound ennui. It is a picture of true girlhood, maybe the first in Western art.
The painting is a jewel of the new exhibition Mary Cassatt at Work, on display through January 26, 2025, at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor as part of its centennial celebrations. “We think of her as such a familiar figure, but this show really demonstrates that she’s ripe for rediscovery,” says Emily Beeny, who was appointed the museum’s first-ever chief curator in early 2024. Beeny led the effort to bring the Cassatt show from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Legion of Honor—the artist’s first solo exhibition in Northern California—in part to “recapture the strangeness and radicalism” of this American impressionist in Paris.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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The show is rich with the subversive power of women shining light on other women (and themselves) after centuries of being described, inscribed, and circumscribed by men. The ubiquity of the male gaze is something Cassatt herself famously treated with humor, and painterly brio, in her canvas In the Loge (1878), the first impressionist painting she exhibited in the United States and another highlight of the Legion show.
In the painting, Cassatt depicts a woman close to the viewer, seated in a theater balcony in bravura black, a bit of white lace accenting her wrists and neck, a small pearl earring glowing against her pale skin. She grasps a closed fan in one hand and with the other holds binoculars up to her eyes. This is a put-together woman who is looking for herself, just as the artist depicting her is looking. And yet, even here a woman can’t enjoy her own pleasure away from prying male eyes. Above her, in the upper left of the painting, is the figure of a man leaning over the balcony railing, his own binoculars trained on the woman looking elsewhere. It’s funny, and accurate, and one American reviewer gave it some of the “highest” praise female artists historically received, writing that Cassatt’s painting “surpassed the strength of most men.”
The compliment—backhanded and unsurprisingly so—is yet another example of how the female gaze has not been recognized nearly enough in Western art. Beeny’s career, especially in California, has offered a significant remedy. With the Cassatt exhibition, Beeny adds yet another acclaimed and reclaimed female artist to the walls of California museums.
The Art of Motherhood
In his opening remarks at the October press preview for Mary Cassatt at Work, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco director and CEO Thomas Campbell neatly pivoted from Cassatt to “another groundbreaking woman,” Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, the primary founder of the Legion of Honor, who on November 11—Armistice Day—in 1924 broke ground on a museum that was then primarily dedicated to French art and to the California soldiers who had died on French soil in World War I. And then Campbell pivoted—again—to Beeny, whose own contributions to French culture were recognized in 2021 when she was awarded the prestigious Prix du Rayonnement by the Académie Française for her scholarly research and writing on French artists.
Beeny’s childhood encounters with French art were especially resonant and initiated her appreciation for civic art museums. She wrote to me in an email, “Growing up in Washington [D.C.], with free and open access to the National Gallery of Art, played a crucial role in my becoming an art historian. I’m so grateful that my parents took me there and helped me understand, even when I was quite small, that those pictures somehow belonged to me—and, indeed, to everyone. I was always especially attracted to the French galleries: Fragonard and the sunlit fantasies of the Rococo, and then, perhaps conversely, Manet—troubling, fascinating, indelible.”
Beeny stayed on the East Coast for college, attending Columbia University from undergraduate level through her PhD, for which she wrote her dissertation on the towering French baroque painter Nicolas Poussin. It’s the kind of major-figure dissertation topic you don’t often see in art history anymore, where so much has already been researched and written on artists central to the Western canon. Beeny’s knack for recognizing artists or aspects of their work hidden in plain sight proved an especially good fit for the West Coast.
“When I first moved out to California, it was for an internship at the [J. Paul] Getty Museum in Los Angeles,” she recalls, describing her 2009 relocation. “I had been living in New York for about a decade, and I thought, Oh, I’ll stay for nine months and go right back to the East Coast. But then I totally fell in love with California living.”
It was while serving as associate curator of drawings at the Getty in 2021 that Beeny beat out other bidders at a Christie’s auction in Paris to acquire a revolutionary pastel of a nursing mother by French 18th-century artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Portrait of Madame Charles Mitoire with Her Children (1783). The first portrait of an identified contemporary nursing mother to be exhibited at the Paris Salon, the work went for more than quadruple its high estimate. Beeny is effusive in her description of Labille-Guiard’s pastel, calling it “iconographically daring and a pathbreaking work in terms of its subject matter and just beautifully rendered by one of the great masters of this medium.”
The bidding was a nail-biter. “I was sitting there in terror watching that sale, you know, afraid that the Louvre would preempt it,” Beeny says of the $764,000 purchase. She’d gone hard, but knew she’d won big. So big that she feared the French government might step in. “I would have understood if they had decided that this was too important a piece of French cultural patrimony to allow it to leave the country. I would have been very sympathetic to that position, although, of course, I desperately wanted to bring it to California.”
A work that had mostly been in private hands since it was created in the 18th century, publicly known only through black-and-white reproductions, now resides in living color in California. “In addition to its exquisite beauty,” Beeny said in a Getty press release at the time, “this pastel allows our visitors to explore the tangled relationship between women’s professional ambitions and the emergence of modern domesticity in the period.”
In other words, 100 years before Mary Cassatt, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard was exploring the value of women’s work, whether that was making art or raising children or both. Like Cassatt, Labille-Guiard was a female artist without children of her own, elevating a depiction of contemporary motherhood as worthy of high art.
Acquiring Labille-Guiard’s groundbreaking portrait for an American museum was a cultural coup. But that same year, Beeny left the Getty—famous for its deep pockets when it comes to acquisitions—for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. If the move struck some as surprising, it shouldn’t have. “The amazing thing about San Francisco,” Beeny explains, “is that it is…not just one of the most beautiful cities in the United States but one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I mean, I think topographically, botanically, in all of these ways, it’s just a very special place. It’s awfully beautiful. And the sight of the Legion of Honor really exemplifies that. Perched above the Pacific on this cliff. It’s spectacular.”
A Handful of Women
Today, Beeny is a consummate Californian—albeit one with a certain Audrey Hepburn gamine style. Three years after joining the Legion of Honor, she continues to compare the Bay Area with the more art-centric L.A. “It’s very different from Los Angeles,” she concedes. “I think part of it has to do with the way that the history of the Wild West feels present in San Francisco.”
The Wild West, yes, is still in evidence, and maybe especially at the Legion of Honor. When philanthropist Spreckels used a golden spade to ceremonially initiate construction on her museum—corollary to Leland Stanford’s golden spike commemorating the completion of the transcontinental railway—she was, quite literally, touching a foundational time in San Francisco history.
“I think it’s important to remember that, even with the lofty goals behind the construction of the Legion of Honor, building it led to the desecration and destruction of 1,500 graves in the section of City Cemetery devoted to the indigent,” says Beth Winegarner, author of the book San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries (who wrote on the subject for Alta Journal 21). When the Legion was renovated in the 1990s, around 740 coffins were disinterred; some remains were turned over to the San Francisco medical examiner, and most were reburied south of the city in the town of Colma. But many others are still where they were originally interred. Winegarner explains that “when you’re in the underground gallery the museum built in the early 1990s, you’re surrounded by the graves of impoverished San Franciscans.” It’s both sad and somehow not unfitting, considering the Legion was intended as something of a memorial to those who had died in a recent war, though on French soil.
The French government acknowledged Spreckels’s tribute by gifting the Legion with narrative tapestries that illustrate the story of Joan of Arc. The tapestries, created at the legendary Gobelins Manufactory in Paris, were known to San Franciscans: They were first shown in 1915 at the French Pavilion of the city’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition. And while the thematic presence of Joan of Arc in San Francisco might seem odd, standing just outside the entrance to the Legion of Honor today is a monumental equestrian statue of the French military leader, made by American sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington and donated by her to the Legion just two years after it opened.
San Francisco has a mere handful of public sculptures depicting historical women, and only a small number of them were made by female artists. One notable and welcome new addition is Lava Thomas’s monument to Maya Angelou, Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman, unveiled outside the San Francisco Public Library’s main branch in September 2024 after a public controversy over its installation.
Filling Some of The Gaps
More than two centuries before Thomas and nearly a century before Cassatt, a review of the Paris Salon described Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s painting Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell (1791) by declaring, “I thought that women were hardly capable of composing history paintings, above all to this degree of perfection.” Hers was the first history painting—a genre in which multifigure works depict scenes from mythology, literature, or the Bible—by a female artist ever shown at the Paris Salon, and it was acquired by Beeny for the Legion of Honor in 2022. It’s a notable work, not just because it was groundbreaking but because Benoist, rather than depict the traditional (usually nude) scene of Psyche with her mysterious lover, Cupid, chose a moment of tearful embrace between mother and daughter before the latter embarks for her unknown fate. It is an entirely different worldview—one where two women are the heroes and main characters of art—and it’s a fabulous canvas that fits perfectly into the Legion’s collection. “We were missing a major neoclassical history painting,” Beeny says. Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell, she notes, was painted by a pupil of both Jacques-Louis David and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and “helped us to fill that gap.” Benoist’s painting now hangs in a Legion gallery alongside the work of her far-better-known teachers.
If social media is any indicator (and I think it is), Beeny’s most recent acquisition is her most widely appreciated, from shout-outs in major art publications to any number of glad museumgoer selfies. Lavinia Fontana’s Portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli and Her Children (circa 1604–05)—the first work by a female artist from before 1700 to enter the Legion’s collection—depicts a Roman noblewoman with 6 of the 19 children she had before dying at age 37 during childbirth. Fontana herself gave birth to 11 children, and the artist’s understanding of fierce maternal pride is evident in the portrait of a noblewoman whose children are dressed to the hilt as if suited up in armor; they wear matching neck ruffs and heavy brocades, but each child’s unique personality shines through. While Fontana’s main subject has a certain haughty fierceness as she meets our gaze, the artist softens our impression by having her cup a little dog in her left hand. Her other hand is held by the only girl among the children, who wraps her hand around her mother’s right forefinger and with her other gingerly holds the dog’s tiny right paw. It’s sweet but not cloying—the kind of thing real children do. Something that Fontana, and female artists from Labille-Guiard to Cassatt, knew well.
Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair is from the collection of the National Gallery in D.C., where Beeny first encountered it—and fell in love—when she was young herself. It is, unquestionably, one of the great paintings of the 19th century, and seeing it in person in Mary Cassatt at Work is one of the many gifts of the Legion exhibition. It seems fitting that the first solo show in San Francisco of one of America’s most significant artists was spearheaded by the Legion’s first chief curator, a woman admirably shaking up California museum collections. Alma Spreckels would no doubt approve.•
Mary Cassatt at Work
- Through Jan. 26, 2025
- Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 100 34th Ave., San Francisco
- famsf.org
Bridget Quinn is a writer, art historian, and critic living in western Sonoma County. She’s the author of the biography Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry, and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and the books She Votes and Broad Strokes.
