Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you not to laugh as you listen. Or rather, I don’t mind if you laugh, but I wish to speak a little of a truth so commonplace that everyone overlooks it—the fact that the true nature of “happiness” is, unexpectedly, hidden in the scent of freshly laundered sheets or perhaps in the sight of a parent and child’s silhouette at a sudden sunset.
There is a lady named Mary Cassatt. Born in America, she was a woman who held a paintbrush in the Paris of the late nineteenth century, a time when horse-drawn carriages clattered over cobblestones. She worked alongside the so-called “Impressionists,” surrounded by men like Monet and Renoir—fellows who spent their lives chasing particles of light, looking a bit detached from the world—while she fought her own battle, remarkably cool and solitary.
What she painted was always decided. A mother washing a child’s feet, or perhaps reading a picture book aloud on her lap—scenes so “ordinary” and “domestic” that hanging the grandiose sign of “Art” upon them seemed almost out of place. The critics of the world tried to praise her with sugary words like “maternity” or “affection,” but I cannot help but feel, behind her paintings, a more urgent and sharper “eye.”
She remained single all her life. She had no children of her own, yet she gazed more deeply than anyone at the existence of a child—at that squishy, yet almost cruelly vivid, vital force. This is not a feat achievable by just any “kind auntie.” Within the “void” that is the elusive mundane—or should I say, the hell of daily life—she forcibly tethered those moments of tangible certainty with her pigments.
For instance, there is a representative work of hers depicting a mother holding a child. There, you won’t find a trace of the divine halos seen in Renaissance religious paintings. All that exists is the heavy weight of the infant’s head and the slight muscular tension in the mother’s tired but steady arm. Is this not what it means to be “alive” in the truest sense?
We tend to long for grand happiness—winning the lottery, finding an elixir of immortality, or becoming the king of the world. However, looking at Cassatt’s paintings, all such things begin to seem like cotton candy floating in the sky. What she depicted was the moment a soap bubble vanishes, or that irredeemable yet precious “now” spent dozing in the diagonal sunlight streaming through a window.
Cassatt was also deeply enamored with Japanese Ukiyoe prints. In the clean precision of capturing forms with lines, as seen in the works of Kitagawa Utamaro, she must have felt a resonance with her own soul. Stripping away unnecessary decoration and extracting only the “truth” that resides there. Looking at her prints, one feels a certain grim intensity, as if a space had been sliced out with a single stroke of a blade.
Therefore, if you ever grow weary of life and find your daily existence tasting like dry sand, please remember the paintings of Mary Cassatt. She teaches us that the way you nonchalantly sip your tea, or the very fingertips with which you wash dirty dishes for someone else’s sake, are more brilliant than any star in the universe and possess a value worthy of being painted.
There is no need to brandish lofty philosophy. There is simply love. Or, if not quite love, the heavy, undeniable fact of one person being with another. Cassatt knew that beauty. Her brush never lied. Without coddling, yet without turning away, she quietly kept watch over the workings of humanity.
Ah, I seem to have become somewhat preachy. How embarrassing. But don’t you think that, once in a while, spending a night talking about a woman painter and counting the “small lights” around you isn’t such a bad way to pass the time? The flush of the cheeks and the whiteness of the baby clothes she painted still flicker behind my eyelids, gently and powerfully.