Mary Cassatt,
The Child s Bath (1893). Robert A. Waller Fund. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.
When Mother’s Day was proposed as a holiday in 1913, American-French artist Mary Cassatt was not particularly keen on the idea. “As a staunch supporter of women’s suffrage, she thought granting women the right to vote was a far more pressing issue than a single day celebrating mother,” explained Kimberly A. Jones, curator of the National Gallery’s 2014 exhibition “Degas/Cassatt.”
The lack of enthusiasm might come as a surprise. Cassatt and motherhood are nearly synonymous in the public imagination in her painted world babies and young children tenderly cling to their mothers, their tangles of hands and limbs becoming like one entity.
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum in 2017. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Facing a small classroom, former Republican senator and current CNN pundit Rick Santorum stands at a podium emblazoned with the logo of the Young America’s Foundation, an organization for conservative youth.
There are six young women in the front row, arms crossed, waiting intently for Catholic Dad™ to tell them the story of his “fight for religious freedom,” and he doesn’t disappoint. After a 20-minute preamble about the Civil Rights era, which he describes as destroying the soul of America, Santorum pauses briefly, then says: “We birthed a nation from nothing.”
The Cathedral of Art (1942–1944, unfinished). Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
When Florine Stettheimer died in 1944, at the age of 72, the New York artist, poet, and salonnière, was still putting the final touches on
The Cathedrals of Art, the last in a series of four monumental paintings devoted to New York’s cultural, social, and economic temples. Identical in scale, each painting measures five feet tall by just over four feet wide.
The series, which includes
The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931)
, and
The Cathedrals of Wall Street (1939), was a winkingly aware homage to places of worship in the city she’d called home for all her adult life. For the deeply private artist,
In episode three, the debutantes and suitors have gathered at Somerset House to see the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition. The brooding Duke of Hastings, it turns out, is also a patron of the arts and has donated a trove of family paintings to the exhibition.
In the scene, Daphne and Simon share a moment of intimacy while gazing at a landscape that once belonged to Simon’s late mother. “The other paintings are certainly very grand and impressive, but this one… this one is intimate,” Daphne remarks. Standing side by side, their hands briefly touch a forbidden caress for those yet to be wed.
Cézanne Painted Mont Sainte-Victoire Dozens of Times. Here Are 3 Things You May Not Know About His Obsession With the Mountain
Japanese prints helped inspire the artist s famous series.
Montagne Sainte-Victoire(1904–06). Collection of the Musée D Orsay.
Paul Cézanne’s muse was not a person but a mountain. Montagne Sainte-Victoire, a mountain overlooking Aix-en-Provence in southern France, fascinated the visionary artist for decades, resulting in over 30 oil paintings and watercolors made over the course of his life.
The mountain, whose name means “Mountain of Holy Victory,” was by no means astoundingly large: it measures a modest 3,317 feet. But it is steeped in local and personal lore. For Cézanne, who lived most of his life in Aix, and who established a studio with a view of the mountain in nearby Les Lauves in 1902, it was a nostalgic reminder of nature’s beauty and endurance.