Frenchy love!

In a slightly belated nod to Bastille Day, I'd like to give a shout-out to the relationship between American artists and the great nation of France. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, any American artist worth his (or less often, her) salt spent some time in la France soaking up aesthetic education, either formally or less so.

A much-studied--and absolutely wonderful--example of an American in Paris is Mary Cassatt's In the Loge, from 1878 and in the Boston MFA. A Philadelphia native, Cassatt moved to France permanently in the 1870s and pursued her career there (being independently wealthy helped with the whole prejudice-against-women-artists problem).

The woman at the opera trains her glasses toward the stage, or toward another audience member. At the same time, the man in the background is looking at her. And in a very modern way, we, the viewer also become part of this voyeuristic exercise. It's all a deliciously complex and skillfully wrought exploration of manners and conventions. Ah, oui. (image source)