Register now for our event on Saturday, February 20, from 11-12:15 p.m. Pacific time, for a talk by art historian, curator and author Nancy Mowll Mathews on “Austen and Cassatt: Working From Home.”
Mathews is the Emerita Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art at the Williams College Museum of Art directing the Prendergast Archive and Study Center and teaching in the Williams College Art Department and Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Using letter writing as the core activity of “work” for the educated and prosperous classes, Mathews will compare Austen and Cassatt’s own work lives, their long-distance communications and how they represent women working from home in their art. As appropriate for our current remote work lives and use of Zoom, she will draw comparisons with the similar stay-at-home professionalism of the 19th century.
Mathews received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, where she began her long career as a preeminent Cassatt scholar. Of the more than 15 books and exhibitions she has produced, the best known are Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, Cassatt: The Color Prints and Mary Cassatt: A Life. Most recently she curated and co-wrote the catalogue for Mary Cassatt: An American Impressionist in Paris for the Jacquemart-André Museum (Paris, 2018).
In addition to her work on Cassatt, she is the co-author of the Prendergast catalogue raisonné and numerous other books on Maurice and Charles Prendergast, Paul Gauguin, and the relationship between art and early film.
