Sunflower and the Suffragettes - A Mary Cassatt Mystery
An art historian recently uncovered how the painter's clear support for women's rights had been lost in curation
Say what you will about the artist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), it would be hard to deny that the woman knew how to depict flowers with realism.
Consider this Cassatt painting of a woman with a zinnia. There’s nothing unusual about the proportion of the flower to the woman or to the bench on which she’s sitting.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely familiar with Cassatt’s work. We can agree that she knew what she was doing as an artist.
So what to make of the sunflower in the painting seen below?
Cassatt shows us a woman in a dressing gown sitting with a child, clearly a domestic scene. But for some reason, the woman adds to her negligee an enormous sunflower.
Does that make sense?
I mean, how would you even pin a sunflower to what looks like a silky garment? And why would you do that?
In her long career, Cassatt largely stuck to realistic scenes. She repeatedly painted families, women and children, not wood nymphs and fantasy scenarios.
Let’s look again at the zinnia and sunflower paintings and also a third Cassatt painting, showing a woman in formal attire with a flower in her hat.
We see a normal lady admiring a flower, a normal lady with a fancy flower hat, and then…. hhhmm. What does this unrealistic use of a big sunflower in a domestic scene tell us?
The sunflower painting raised this question for Nikki Georgopulos, who served as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the National Gallery of Art.
Critics earlier had described the sunflower in this painting as “an unusual motif” and sought to link it to themes of fertility and motherhood, Georgopulos wrote in a 2022 article in Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.
From the time National Gallery of Art acquired this painting in 1963 until 2019, this work was known as “Mother and Child.”
With that title, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was one of many paintings Cassatt did on that theme, and arguably it is not among her best depictions of the mother-child relationship.
After all, the viewer’s gaze is drawn first to the big sunflower.
It commands our attention, and then we move on to wonder what’s the rest of the story. Is the woman trying to tell the child something important, perhaps about her future? The child looks very serious.
But still our attention goes back to the sunflower.
Why, it’s almost as if the painting’s true subject was the woman with the sunflower.
Aha.
Perhaps it was.
The yellow-and-black color combination had been linked to efforts to secure for women the right to vote since at least 1867. Suffragists that year used the Kansas state flower, the sunflower, as part of a campaign. Georgopulos knew that by the time Cassatt painted this work in 1905, the sunflower already was well established as an official symbol of the suffragist movement.
“While scholars before me had dismissed it as merely a pretty decoration, my research revealed that it bore a powerful political message,” Georgopulos wrote about the Cassatt painting.
Cassatt herself may not have given a fixed formal title to this painting, Georgopulos said in a 2021 interview with the podcast A Long Look. It was sold around 1914 as “Woman with a Sunflower” and then in parentheses (The Mirror).
As Georgopulos dug into the history of the painting, she found it seemed to have first acquired the title, “Mother and Child” when it entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in 1963. In the interview with A Long Look, Georgopulos said she actually found the document where “a curator crossed out ‘Woman with a sunflower’ and wrote in ‘Mother and Child’.”
And it appears that this painting was among the works that Cassatt contributed to a 1915 exhibition, organized by her friend, the noted art collector and suffragette activist Louisine Havemeyer. “Proceeds from the exhibit, garnered from entry fees, founded the Woman Suffrage Campaign Fund, fulfilling Havemeyer’s desire that her art collection ‘take part in the suffrage campaign’,” Georgopulos wrote.
Cassatt may never have boldly called herself a suffragette, but this loan was not her only act in support of women’s rights.
“There’s a sort of what I call a scholarly allergy to calling Cassatt a feminist, because there’s no written record of her ever using that word to describe herself, even though there is a wealth of evidence to support the idea that she was someone who was deeply devoted to the idea of the equality of the sexes and genders,” Georgopulos said during the A Long Look podcast.
In fact, according to a post from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Cassatt made her view quite clear, on the domestic front.
"In 1915, Cassatt participated in a charity exhibition to support the cause of women’s suffrage. Her sister-in-law, Eugenie Carter Cassatt, who opposed women’s suffrage, boycotted the show, along with other family members. Angry and disappointed, Cassatt sold several of her works that had been earmarked for Eugenie and her other heirs,” the Crystal Bridges post says.
For more on Cassatt, read my Medium essay Cassatt : More Than Merely Pretty. Let me know if you need a friend link to get around the Medium paywall.
For a treat, listen to this interview with Georgopulos on the podcast A Long Look. In it, Georgopulos explains how the National Gallery of Art was moved to change the title of the painting. Here’s a link to a 2020 blog Georgopulos wrote for the NGA, “Mary Cassatt’s Suffragist Symbolism.”
Here’s the official citation for her Panorama article: Nicole Georgopulos, “‘The Sunflower’s Bloom of Women’s Equality’: New Contexts for Mary Cassatt’s La Femme au tournesol,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8, no. 1 (Spring 2022),
There aren't enough emoticons to signify how much I enjoyed this!