“Mary Cassatt: Works on Paper,” currently at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, is a small show but a meaningful one. Cassatt is the Impressionist nobody knows, partially because she was such a one-off — not just an American but a woman, and this at a time when the world of French art was not exactly hospitable to either.
Cassatt had a reputation for being highly opinionated and something of a tough old bird, but she had to be — she always was facing obstacles of one sort or another, ranging from her father’s resistance to her career choice, or the obstinance of the French Academy. Whether out of necessity, or just a contrarian desire for experimentation, Cassatt always was bobbing and weaving, experimenting, absorbing, trying things out to see what they looked like.
The valuable thing about the exhibit is the way it demonstrates Cassatt’s try-anything approach, which accelerated near century’s end and continued until her eyesight began to fail around 1915.

Cassatt was mentored by Degas, but she didn’t draw terribly well. Her preparatory sketches are extremely rough, and she takes pains only with the face, probably under the quite correct impression that the face is what most people focus on.
Many of the pieces on display are counterproofs, a reverse impression of the original made by moistening a blank sheet of paper and running it and the original through a printing press. Some of the works, such as Sketch of a Mother Looking Down at Thomas, from 1894, or Baby Charles Looking over His Mother’s Shoulder (No. 2) from 1900, are luscious pastels, loving, spiritual evocations of maternal devotion.
These are pictures full of an unsurpassed tenderness, but Cassatt long had demonstrated an affinity for the subject. (Her flair with children and mothers is poignant, considering she never married, feeling that domestic life was incompatible with an artist’s career.)
Other pieces are far more experimental, as with The Barefooted Child, from 1896, a drypoint piece that has some of the eccentric colors normally associated with Van Gogh in his fevered final days -— a wall that’s somewhere between apricot and mustard, for instance. Interestingly, Cassatt often would use bolder, more intense colors in proofs she printed for herself than in the final versions meant for exhibition and sale.
Afternoon Tea Party, a drypoint from 1890, shows off a heavy Japanese influence in both style and color. The figures are flat, the colors are a light wash.
Cassatt clearly was an overtly experimental artist, and the exhibit includes several states of prints, so we can see how she achieved her overall effect and gauge the choices she made as she made them.
What Cassatt learned from Degas was an open curiosity about the multitudinous possibilities of art, not just in subject but in style and technique. That freedom of approach informs this stimulating show.
~ scott_eyman@pbpost.com