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| Mary Cassatt Louisine W. Havemeyer 1896 pastel Shelburne Museum, Vermont |
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| Mary Cassatt Mrs. Havemeyer & her daughter Electra 1895 pastel Shelburne Museum, Vermont |
Mary Cassatt's pastel portraits from the mid-1890s of her friend Louisine Havemeyer (1855-1929) are hanging today in Vermont's Shelburne Museum. This institution would one day be founded by the little girl sitting in her mother's lap, above.
Electra Havemeyer Webb, her brother and her sister each received paintings from their mother's collection before she donated a substantial part of it to the Metropolitan Museum at the end of the 1920s. The brother Horace and his wife eventually gave important parts of their legacy to the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Sister Adaline's family have added work to the existing Havemeyer collection at the Met.
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| Mary Cassatt Adaline Havemeyer in a White Hat 1898 pastel Metropolitan Museum Gift of members of the family of Adaline Havemeyer Frelinghuysen |
Electra, the youngest, was the one who decided to create her own museum from the ground up. The Shelburne Museum today boasts of possessing "the largest U.S. museum collection of glass canes, trivets, and food molds." It also incorporates six complete furnished rooms which were dismantled and transported from Electra Havemeyer's Park Avenue residence. Further space in this museum has been allotted to the paintings below, collected by her parents –
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| Edgar Degas Two Dancers c. 1879 pastel & gouache |
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| Edgar Degas Dance Class c. 1873-79 oil & tempera |
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| Claude Monet Ice Floes 1880 |
I compare the ice floes above, now at the Shelburne Museum, with Mrs. Havemeyer's other Monet painting of ice floes, below, included in her original gift to the Metropolitan Museum.
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| Claude Monet Ice Floes 1893 |
Electra Havemeyer owned another winter Monet also, the grainstacks under snow, now also in Vermont.
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| Claude Monet Grainstacks - Snow Effect 1891 |
The mother-child pictures below by Mary Cassatt and the evanescent females of Degas were included in Louisine Havemeyer's original bequest to the Met, part of the public collection in New York since the 1930s.
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| Mary Cassatt Mother & Child (Florentine Madonna) c. 1899 Metropolitan Museum |
"Early in our collecting, when Mr. Havemeyer and I were chatting with Miss Cassatt after dinner, she suddenly looked up from her coffee, and holding the little spoon in her hand, she made a convincing gesture and said emphatically: "To make a great collection it is necessary to have the modern note in it, and to be a great painter, you must be classic as well as modern."
"I at once thought of a beautiful painting which M. Durand-Ruel had allowed us to buy out of his own collection. Miss Cassatt had done a mother with her baby's head upon her shoulder, which we had always called her Florentine Madonna. It united the old and the modern just as she said it should be."
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| Mary Cassatt The Barefooted Child color aquatint c. 1896-97 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Edgar Degas Three Dancers preparing for Class c. 1878 pastel Metropolitan Museum |
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| Edgar Degas Girl pulling on her stockings c. 1876-77 monotype Metropolitan Museum |