Cross-Continental Impressionists: Cassatt – McNicoll at the Art Gallery of Ontario
By Nicole Entin
The name of Mary Cassatt carries significant weight in feminist art historical narratives as one of the most recognised and accomplished female Impressionists, an outspoken pioneer of this avant-garde movement who was instrumental in carving out a place for women in an overwhelmingly male dominated group. Yet apart from Cassatt, most writing on the Impressionists only highlights a select few women who achieved artistic and commercial success, including Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracquemond, and Eva Gonzalès. The Art Gallery of Ontario’s recent exhibition, however, presented the works of Mary Cassatt alongside a lesser-known name born north of the American border: Helen McNicoll. Born in 1871, McNicoll would have been only eight years old when Cassatt first exhibited with the Impressionist group in 1879. Yet despite their different generations, upbringings, and artistic education, the presentation of McNicoll’s paintings next to those of Cassatt demonstrated a stylistic and thematic kinship between these two artists, effectively structured to juxtapose the oeuvres of Cassatt and McNicoll as – indicated by the exhibition’s title – a pair of Impressionists Between Worlds.
At its most effective, Cassatt – McNicoll: Impressionists Between Worlds presented the complementary works of its two central artists to provoke the contemplation of women’s roles in the social and art worlds of the late nineteenth century. The exhibition began with a timeline of Mary Cassatt and Helen McNicoll’s lives placed in parallel. While the generational difference between the two artists meant that it took some time for their lives to intersect, the timeline demonstrated that despite never meeting each other, Cassatt and McNicoll contributed to the spread of Impressionism into North America and established a place for women in the development of new artistic movements. Although the curation of Cassatt – McNicoll was perhaps not the most audacious exhibition concept or layout that the AGO had created, it was nevertheless purposeful and well thought-out in its simplicity. Details such as the lighting at the beginning and end of the exhibition, resembling sunlight filtered through tree branches [Fig. 1], reinforced the Impressionist styles and outdoor subjects that are depicted in Cassatt and McNicoll’s paintings. The exhibition was divided into thematic sections, the most compelling being those that placed Cassatt and McNicoll’s works side-by-side to compare and contrast their approaches to similar ideas, such as ‘Posing Models, Making Art’, and ‘Professional Artists’.
[Figure 1] Nicole Entin, Installation View of Cassatt – McNicoll: Impressionists Between Worlds, 2023, iPhone photograph, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
The exhibition brings together a substantial variety of materials other than paintings, including several of Cassatt’s aquatint etchings, McNicoll’s sketchbooks, various turn-of-the-century paraphernalia, and an intriguing video installation entitled ‘Close Looking at Helen McNicoll’s Interior’. In this two-minute video, McNicoll’s Interior (c. 1913) has been animated to invite viewers ‘to consider how the artist marked the passage of time in this space’, moving from day to night and rendering elements such as the wind through the curtains, a rocking chair, and a fire in the fireplace. While the introduction of digital media is always an intriguing draw for contemporary exhibitions, and was certainly popular with the attendees that I observed interacting with the installation, the singular instance admittedly felt slightly out of place in this particular exhibition.
There is no shortage of academic papers describing the visualisation of the boundary between public and private worlds in the works of women Impressionists, and the curatorial concept of the AGO’s exhibition played extensively on this all-too-familiar theme. The introduction of the lesser-known Helen McNicoll, however, ensured that this topic was not entirely devoid of novelty. The first set of paintings in Cassatt – McNicoll were two scenes of women reading: Cassatt’s On a Balcony (1878-1879) and McNicoll’s In the Tent (1913-1914) [Figure 2]. The caption for the two paintings asserted that ‘Cassatt and McNicoll represented women in a way they hadn’t often been shown before, with complex thoughts and full lives.’ The woman in Cassatt’s painting reads a newspaper, demonstrating her intellect and active interest in the current events of the contemporary world, while McNicoll’s figure turns the pages of an art book. Despite being set in outdoor spaces, the enclosed compositions of both works isolate the subjects from the public world, with Cassatt’s newspaper reader seated within the cage-like structure of her chair and McNicoll’s artist inside the tent. At this point in their respective careers, Cassatt’s bold technique and adept handling of her brush is more developed than that of McNicoll, but both painters display their own interpretations of the Impressionist style in their renderings of atmosphere and texture.
[Figure 2] (Left) Mary Cassatt, On a Balcony, 1878-1879, oil on canvas, 89.9 x 65.2 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. (Right) Helen McNicoll, In the Tent, 1913-1914, oil on canvas, 80 x 59.5 cm, private collection, Toronto.
Another nearby set of paintings emphasised the place of women in liminal spaces between the public exterior and domestic interior. In Young Girl at a Window (c. 1883-84) [Fig. 3], Cassatt’s composition echoes similar works by women Impressionists such as Berthe Morisot’s On the Balcony (1871-72). Like Morisot, Cassatt places her female subject behind a metal railing, positioning the woman as a passive spectator to the outside world rather than an active, independent flâneur. While Cassatt’s young subject is not yet burdened by the responsibilities of motherhood, as in Morisot’s mother and child scene, she holds a lapdog that could symbolise her future duties of care to an infant. Both the girl and the dog seem to express an unspoken longing for the freedom of the world beyond the domestic space, with the dog staring down into the street below and the line of the girl’s body angled slightly towards the exterior.
[Figure 3] Mary Cassatt, Young Girl at a Window, c. 1883-1884, oil on canvas, 100.3 x 64.7 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Next to Cassatt’s painting, McNicoll’s The Open Door (c. 1913) [Fig. 4] demonstrates an insightful and empathetic approach to its subject matter, painted in the same year that she was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists and only two years before her untimely death caused by diabetes. The room that McNicoll’s subject stands in is whitewashed and in stark contrast to the vibrant colours seen through the titular open door. Engaged in a domestic task of sewing, the woman is positioned directly on the border between interior and exterior as delineated by the doorframe. Rather depicting her subject in a seated pose more typical of female subjects who sew or embroider, McNicoll’s composition suggests the potential for women’s agency or ‘border-crossing’. By positioning McNicoll and Cassatt’s paintings next to each other, the exhibition used comparative motifs to enhance its central themes of women’s societal roles and the tension between tradition and modernity, domestic and public life.
[Figure 4] Helen McNicoll, The Open Door, 1913, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 63.5 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Cassatt – McNicoll: Impressionists Between Worlds concluded with a quote by Mary Cassatt emblazoned above a pair of paintings by the exhibition’s two central artists: ‘Now please don’t let your ambition sleep.’ It is a powerful reminder of the significance of these two ambitious North American women blazing a trail in the European male-dominated circles of Impressionism. While Cassatt – McNicoll might not have been the AGO’s most ambitious exhibition, it was certainly successful in delivering its concept and message, shining a light on an overlooked figure in studies of Impressionist art while presenting the works of a well-known artist from a new perspective.