The Paintings Left Behind: Two New Paintings by Mary Cassatt from Seville

Years earlier, fortune had favored me. When a stranger in a Manhattan nightclub had offered to show me a lost Spanish-subject painting by William Turner Dannat (1853–1929) he kept in an out-of-the way Bronx neighborhood, I moved past the obvious absurdity of this proposal and found a work that embellished my dissertation. Now boarding a train toward an affluent suburb northeast of Madrid, I wondered what this journey would bring. I had been contacted a little over a year earlier by a person who claimed to have two paintings by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). As far as I knew, the only Cassatt painting in a Spanish collection was a beautiful mother and child from about 1890, which had been purchased by the provincial government of Vizcaya from the Exposición Internacional de Pintura y Escultura for the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao in 1919.¹ But this collector had written a very intriguing email:

Let me introduce myself: I am Sevillian and live in Madrid. As I am much interested in nineteenth century Spanish painting, I have done some research about [costumbrista painting in Seville]. I also have read your splendid book Vistas de España, and I have found some interesting details you might be interested to know about. I have in my collection two paintings related to some paintings by Mary Cassatt that are in your book and as far as I know are completely unknown to the scholars. One represents a young Sevillian girl in a window, is signed on the left corner, similar in concept of 4.17 illustrated and similar size: 62,5 x 48,5 cm. The other one is clearly the sketch of 4.2 (On the Balcony).²

I was skeptical—as Cassatt did not produce many studies—but I did a quick Google search to see if I could verify the identity of the individual who had written. Bingo! I did indeed find his book, the study of a mid-nineteenth-century costumbrista (genre) painter from Seville who specialized in picturesque Andalusian subjects. I also wrote back and asked for images. It seemed like a long shot, but Cassatt had begun her career in Spain, spending six months in Seville during the winter of 1872 to 1873. Her most well-known paintings from the trip are On the Balcony (fig. 1), Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter (1873; Clark Art Institute), and Toreador, also known as After the Bullfight (1873; Art Institute of Chicago). These are among Cassatt’s first mature paintings. On the Balcony derives partly from her study of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Francisco Goya, and its early exhibition with the title The Flirtation: A Balcony in Seville makes its amorous content obvious.³ Offering the Panal—the panal is the honeycombed sweet being dipped into a glass of water held by a cocky young woman—is likewise anecdotal and romantic in theme. Cassatt also produced several single-figure images of women during her sojourn in Seville: Head of a Spanish Girl (1872; private collection), Spanish Girl Peeling an Orange (fig. 2), and the painting known today as Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla (fig. 3). All these paintings, with the exception of Head of a Spanish Girl, appear in the Adelyn Breeskin Cassatt catalogue raisonné.⁴ Throughout years of studying artists from the United States who traveled to Spain, I have often wondered how many of them left things behind. At the beginning of her career and without a ready market for her work, might Cassatt have been one of them?

 

Cassatt traveled to Seville from Paris, stopping off in Madrid to visit the Museo del Prado. She arrived in the capital city on October 5 and made her way quickly to the famed museum. Three weeks later, after copying Diego Velázquez, Don Baltasar Carlos (c. 1635; Museo del Prado) and gaining renewed appreciation for the work of Murillo, Cassatt arrived in southern Spain. Whereas the landscape between Madrid and the south had been “immensely sad, vast, and dreary,” Seville was “full of color, gay lively, the Cathedral magnificent, orange trees growing in the streets and squares.” She awoke the day after her arrival, on Tuesday, October 26, to find “the sun shining brightly on this beautiful clean town, [and] a most delicious spring temperature.”⁵ Hoping to paint original works in the charming Andalusian town, she soon found a studio in the Casa de Pilatos, a sixteenth-century palace belonging to the ducal family of Medinaceli in the nineteenth century.

Cassatt’s new workplace undoubtedly fostered her enthusiasm for Spanish subjects, for the Casa de Pilatos had become a tourist site, and guidebooks listed it among the most picturesque attractions in Seville. Commissioned in 1520 after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem by Fadrique Enríquez de Ribera (1476–1539), the first marquis of Tarifa, and constructed in an eclectic mixture of Italian Renaissance and Spanish Mudéjar styles, the building combines open patios adorned with classical sculpture, brilliant Andalusian tile work, and various allusions to Christ’s passion. During Cassatt’s residence, the palace was only occasionally occupied by relatives and friends of the Medinaceli family. The most frequent visitors were artists and other travelers who wanted to see the building’s unusual architecture, and these individuals were welcomed by the Barrera family, who served as caretakers. One of the family, Manuel Barrera, was an amateur painter and, according to Cassatt, it was he who offered her a room in the palace for use as a studio.⁶

Several days after my emailed request, the images arrived in my inbox, and it was these that precipitated my trip to the northern suburbs of Madrid. The first seemed to be a rough oil sketch for On the Balcony (fig. 4); the second was a completely new composition, depicting the same model who appears in Spanish Girl Peeling an Orange and Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla, casually leaning against a window sill (fig. 5). The pose, arms crossed and draped over a support that parallels the picture plane, is similar but in reverse to that employed for the woman on the left of On the Balcony. I eventually learned that the paintings had descended through the Barrera family to a woman who lived around the corner from the palace. From Manuel Barrera, who died without issue, they had passed to his nephew Alejandro Cabrera Rodríguez de Andrade. My correspondent had seen the paintings and recognized their connection to Cassatt after reading my book. Eventually, he was able to purchase them and have them professionally conserved.⁷

Cassatt had described her meeting with Manuel Barrera in a letter to her friend Emily Sartain, written on New Year’s Eve, 1872:

I am all day at Pilats [sic] house, and am known as the “Señora of the Casa Pilatos,” Sundays and weekdays, Christmas and New Years Day—I get there sometimes at ten, or half past seldom as late as eleven, and work steadily to five . . . .  The “intendente” of the Duke of Medina Coeli is a Don Manuel Barrera, he paints very badly himself, but it is he who gave me my studio in the House of Pilate; for he lives there, strange to say although he paints so badly he knows all about art, and has seen so many good artists at work that he can give very good advice, so I profit by it. I suppose you know that the House of Pilate belongs to the Medina Coeli.⁸

Manuel Barrera Haedo (active 1849–1876) is indeed a marginal figure in the history of Spanish painting.⁹ Listed in the Madrid periodical El Clamor Público as exhibiting in the May 1849 Exposición de Bellas Artes in Seville, he appears again in Manuel Ossorio, Galería biográfica as having won a bronze medal in the Seville exhibition of 1858.¹⁰ He is also listed as a painter in the first edition of Manuel Gómez Zarzuela, Guía de Sevilla in 1865, along with more well-known compatriots Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer (1816–1879), Manuel Barrón y Carrillo (1814–1888), and Manuel Cabral y Aguado Bejarano (1827–1891), with whom his work is often confused.¹¹ Like Domínguez Bécquer and Cabral Aguado Bejarano, Barrera specialized in costumbrista painting; art historians Enrique Valdivieso and José Fernández López included two of his paintings, correctly ascribed, in their recent book on painting in Seville.¹² Danza en un interior (fig. 6) gained a certain degree of notoriety during its time, as it was professionally photographed by Charles Clifford and, on occasion, copied by others.¹³ The subject of a woman dancing atop a table, surrounded by guitar players and other accompanists, was frequently essayed by costumbrista painters in Seville.

Although Cassatt did not admire Barrera as a painter, she did find him an astute critic. For his part, Barrera clearly appreciated Cassatt’s work and, with his knowledge of the artistic community in Seville, was able to provide Cassatt with introductions to painters and collectors in the city. And Cassatt was keen to meet them. She wrote candidly to Sartain about working in Spain, never thinking her impolitic words would be made public almost a century and a half later:

The great thing here is the odd types and peculiar rich dark colouring of the models, if it were not for that I should not stay, the artists here are perhaps more flattering than they were in Parma, but I think the Spaniards infinitely inferior in education and breeding to the Italians. There is I believe a fine collection of modern paintings owned by an amateur here. Fortuny’s Madrazos &x, the gentleman called on me, but his gallery is undergoing repairs and I am not to see it yet.¹⁴

The collector she mentions was probably José Domingo Irureta Goyena (1830–1921), a friend of Mariano Fortuny (1838–1874) and a resident in Seville. Irureta Goyena had married into the Errazu family and, like his brother-in-law Ramón de Errazu, amassed an impressive collection of paintings by Spanish artists, including works by Raimundo Madrazo (1841–1920) and Martín Rico (1833–1908), in addition to Fortuny; he exhibited them in his mansion on the nearby Plaza del Triunfo.¹⁵ Madrazo had spent part of 1872 in Seville, and Cassatt may have been referring to one of his Sevillian paintings when she continued to her friend: “Nowadays everything is fashion however, and at present it is grey color, here is Madrazo paints these gypsies with cheeks like some deep red peaches, and he paints them with Malachite green and white. His modelling and his manner as far as I have seen is fine.”¹⁶

Madrazo’s Gypsy (fig. 7), which came to the Prado from the Errazu collection, makes a compelling comparison to this newly discovered painting by Cassatt; both have taken advantage of the “peculiar rich dark colouring of the models,” adorning their raven hair with red carnations, silver earrings, and a red and white mantilla. Cassatt, who probably painted Spanish Girl Leaning on a Window Sill early in her stay, before On the Balcony, has still not quite learned how to keep the black trim on her model’s dress from sitting on the surface of the canvas, yet the modeling of her sitter’s face, the shadows of the neck, and the tapered fingers resting on the forearm are executed with considerable finesse. The signature, “Mary S. Cassatt,” and the dimensions, not quite 25 x 20 inches, conform to other paintings created at this time.

Whereas Barrera, an amateur painter a generation older than his young friend from Philadelphia, worked in a traditional costumbrista manner, Cassatt was moving toward the more naturalistic and cosmopolitan trends of Paris. Barrera wrote soon after her departure from Seville, offering her the studio again the following winter. “It is immense,” Cassatt told Sartain, with “two windows, so if you want to come, we can divide w/ curtains.”¹⁷ Sartain’s response is not recorded, and Cassatt ultimately decided to settle in Paris; she did not return to Spain until some thirty years later, in 1901, traveling as far as Madrid but not to Seville. The addition of these works to Cassatt’s oeuvre brings the nature of this innovative painter’s early artistic development into greater relief; it also demonstrates the extent to which artists from the United States were looking beyond their immediate surroundings in the early 1870s. Cassatt may have given these two paintings to Barrera in appreciation for his advice, or she may have simply forgotten them in the studio when packing for the next stage in her journey, leaving behind a memory of her visit with a friend in Seville.

Cite this article: M. Elizabeth Boone, “The Paintings Left Behind: Two New Paintings by Mary Cassatt from Seville,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 4, no. 2 (Fall 2018), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.1666.

PDF: Boone, The Paintings Left Behind

Notes

About the Author(s): M. Elizabeth Boone is Professor of the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta

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