The Banjo Lesson

Mary Cassatt's drypoint and aquatint print The Banjo Lesson presents two young women, perhaps sisters or a mother and adolescent daughter, seated together as the elder one strums a banjo. Dressed in an outfit with generous puffed blue sleeves, a white bodice, a yellow collar, and a pink dotted pale blue skirt, the player turns her head to watch her fingering along the instrument's neck as she strums. The younger listener, attired in pink and seated closely behind the musician, watches attentively. Cassatt's portrayal of this casual scene of pleasure in music demonstrates her ability to convey psychological subtlety while maintaining the aura of a private moment and her sitters' decorum. In her portraits of more than one sitter, as in her many mother and child images, such as Maternal Caress (TF 1994.5), she often focused on two heads posed closely together. Such a "coupled" composition expresses the intimacy of familial relationships or other close emotional bonds between the figures.

The Banjo Lesson exemplifies Cassatt's commanding use of monotype inking, which imparts an effect of a painter's brushstrokes, particularly on the banjo player's sleeves. This impression is from the fourth and final state; other impressions of this state vary slightly due to Cassatt's applications of different combinations of color. Cassatt adapted this composition, like Gathering Fruit (TF 1993.14), from her image of a banjo-player, representing music, in her major mural Modern Woman, which graced the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. That year, an impression of The Banjo Lesson was included in Cassatt's first retrospective exhibition, at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris.