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Description: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
From the outset of her affiliation with the French impressionists, Mary Cassatt played dual roles as artist and American ambassador. The dealer Ambroise Vollard recalled in his memoirs that “it was with a sort of frenzy...
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.014
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10. Going Public: Mary Cassatt and the 1886 Impressionist Exhibition in New York
Laura D. Corey
From the moment she was affiliated with the French impressionists, Mary Cassatt played dual roles as artist and American ambassador. The dealer Ambroise Vollard recalled in his memoirs that “it was with a sort of frenzy that generous Mary Cassatt labored for the success of her comrades,” and Cassatt herself reflected in 1909 that “it has been one of the chief pleasures of my life to help fine things across the Atlantic,” in reference to her efforts to cultivate a taste and market for impressionism in her native country.1 Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, trans. Violet M. MacDonald (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2002), 180–81, quoted in Erica E. Hirshler, “Helping ‘Fine Things across the Atlantic’: Mary Cassatt and Art Collecting in the United States,” in Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, ed. Judith A. Barter (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 177. Aptly titled after Cassatt’s comment, Hirshler’s essay brought to light the extent of Cassatt’s efforts to propagate her taste, especially for impressionism, to American collectors. The present author’s dissertation, Laura D. Corey, “Mary Cassatt (1844–1926): Portrait of the Artist as Advisor and American Tastemaker” (PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2018), is the first comprehensive, chronological study of Cassatt’s advising practice. See also Laura D. Corey, “The Many Hats of Mary Cassatt: Artist, Advisor, Broker, Tastemaker,” in Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860–1940, ed. Lynn Catterson (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 39–57. While she specialized in placing pictures in private hands, Cassatt kept a broader audience in mind and recognized the potential of public exposure to advance her objectives. She lent her support to several exhibitions that helped introduce French impressionism to her American compatriots, and eventually her advice was sought after for both individual and institutional collections. As much as she has been canonized for inspiring the young Louisine Elder, the future Mrs. Henry Osborne Havemeyer, to become one of the first and most prolific American patrons of French impressionist art, her role in the public debut of impressionism in the United States has never been fully appreciated or documented.2 On the Havemeyer collection, see Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Gary Tinterow, eds., Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993); and Frances Weitzenhoffer, The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America (New York: Abrams, 1986).
The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel organized the inaugural display of the so-called “New Painting” in New York in 1886, coinciding with the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.3 The French critic Edmond Duranty described the movement as “la nouvelle peinture,” or “the new painting,” in an 1876 essay by that name, placing emphasis on the subject matter drawn from contemporary life and innovative style of painting. Translated in Charles S. Moffet, ed., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 37–47. Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris was on view from April 10 to 25 at the galleries of the American Art Association, located on East Twenty-Third Street by Madison Square Park, and then moved down the block to the National Academy of Design for a one-month run starting on May 25.4 Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel, eds., Paul Durand-Ruel: Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 224–25. The American Art Association gallery was located at 6 East Twenty-Third Street(until 1922). The association was founded in 1883 by James Sutton, R. Austin Robertson, and Thomas Kirby; in addition to being a gallery, it was the first auction house in the United States. The National Academy of Design was founded in 1825 and was located on Twenty-Third Street and Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South) from 1865 to 1899, its first permanent home down the block from the American Art Association. The first venue featured 289 pictures from the dealer’s stock; the second was supplemented with twenty-one additional works, including thirteen loans from American private collections. Prior to this exhibition, American audiences had been offered a few glimpses of French impressionism, but never before on this scale. For instance, Louisine Elder lent Degas’s Rehearsal of the Ballet and a Cassatt self-portrait to American Water Color Society shows at the National Academy in 1878 and 1880, respectively, and in 1883 Durand-Ruel sent some seventeen French impressionist pictures to the American Exhibition of Foreign Products, Arts, and Manufactures in Boston.5 These were two of the four impressionist pictures she acquired prior to her marriage to Henry Osborne Havemeyer in 1883. The eleventh annual exhibition of the American Water Color Society held at the National Academy of Design, New York, from February 3 to March 3, 1878, is the first known public display of a Degas in the United States. See Phaedra Siebert, “Appendix: Selected Degas Exhibitions in America, 1878–1936,” in Degas and America: The Early Collectors, ed. Ann Dumas and David A. Brenneman (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2000), 248; Weitzenhoffer, Havemeyers, 41; Durand-Ruel and Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel, 224. On the American Watercolor Society, see Doreen Bolger Burke, “Painters and Sculptors in a Decorative Age,” in In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement, ed. Doreen Bolger Burke (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 315–16. For the American Exhibition of Foreign Products, Art and Manufactures in Boston, see Catalogue of the Art Department: Foreign Exhibition (Boston: Mills, Knight, 1883). Nevertheless, the French impressionists constituted a negligible presence among over four hundred works of art at each of these venues, whereas in 1886 more than 250 (or 80 percent) of the pictures were created by artists who had participated in the impressionist exhibitions in Paris. For the first time, Americans could study a broad survey of the New Painting—including fifty-two Monets, forty-two Pissarros, thirty-nine Renoirs, and twenty-three works by Degas.6 See the exhibition catalogue Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris (New York: American Art Association and National Academy of Design, 1886). Luther Hamilton, the art critic for Cosmopolitan magazine, declared the exhibition “one of the most important artistic events that ever took place” in the United States and reported that “various of the more intelligent critics and patrons of art cried out with zeal that this picture and that ought to be kept in the country.”7 Luther Hamilton, “The Work of the Paris Impressionists in New York,” Cosmopolitan 1, no. 4 (June 1886): 240. This exhibition would thus become a milestone for both French impressionism and Cassatt’s burgeoning career as an art advisor.
The time is ripe to reevaluate Cassatt’s vital contributions in the wake of the 2014–15 Durand-Ruel exhibition that drew attention to the mechanisms behind the market for impressionism.8 Sylvie Patry, Christopher Riopelle, Joseph J. Rishel, Anne Robbins, and Jennifer A. Thompson, eds., Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market (Paris: Grand Palais, 2015). The exhibition was given different titles in each of the three venues: Paul Durand-Ruel, le pari de l’impressionnisme at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery, London; and Discovering the Impressionist: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With the dealer cast as the main protagonist, Cassatt was afforded only a minor supporting role in this exhibition’s catalogue, which limited her influence to helping Durand-Ruel gain a foothold in the United States through her connections to the Havemeyers and the Pennsylvania Railroad circle. This constituted a narrow glimpse into her advising activity, even in partnership with Durand-Ruel.9 Her brother, Alexander, was the seventh president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Regarding the 1886 New York exhibition, Cassatt’s substantial efforts were mentioned only in passing in the biographical essay by Paul-Louis and Flavie Durand-Ruel and were strikingly absent from Jennifer Thompson’s essay “Durand-Ruel in America.”10 Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel wrote that she “assisted her dealer in this undertaking [the 1886 New York exhibition]; she introduced him to her childhood friend Louisine Havemeyer and her husband Henry Osborne Havemeyer, the ‘Sugar King.’” Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel, “Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922): A Portrait,” in Patry et al., Inventing Impressionism, 40; Jennifer A. Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” in Patry et al., Inventing Impressionism, 142–46. For more on Cassatt as a partner to Durand-Ruel in this catalogue, see Sylvie Patry, Anne Robbins, Christopher Riopelle, Joseph J. Rishel, and Jennifer A. Thompson, “Paul Durand-Ruel, an ‘Unrepentant Risk-Taker,’” in Patry et al., Inventing Impressionism, 14; and Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 137, 139, 149. In a June 2015 review, feminist art historian Griselda Pollock went so far as to deem the narrative presented a distortion of art history, in part due to the “disappearing,” “virtual absenting,” and “erasure” of women “involved alongside men in the organisation, promotion and exhibitions of the Independent exhibiting society,” and, as I contend, none more so than Cassatt.11 Griselda Pollock, “The National Gallery Is Erasing Women from the History of Art,” The Conversation, June 3, 2015, https://bit.ly/3ePq774.
Cassatt suffered the same neglect in Michael Leja’s chapter on the 1886 exhibition in Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp.12 Michael Leja, “Impressionism and Nature’s Deceptions,” in Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 93–123. Even the Cassatt literature has never resolved the nature of her organizational role in the 1886 exhibition, which escaped any meaningful attention in the important 1998 catalogue Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman and in biographies by Achille Segard in 1913, Frederick Sweet in 1966, and Nancy Hale in 1975.13 See Hirshler, “Helping ‘Fine Things across the Atlantic’”; Kevin Sharp, “How Mary Cassatt Became an American Artist,” in Barter, Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, 145–75; Achille Segard, Mary Cassatt: Un peintre des enfants et des mères (Paris: Libriarie Paul Ollendorff, 1913); Frederick A. Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, Impressionist from Pennsylvania (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); and Nancy Hale, Mary Cassatt (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975). In her 1998 biography, Nancy Mowll Mathews briefly summarized Cassatt’s participation as “relatively minor, but she did offer Durand-Ruel moral support in the midst of such opposition. She also gave him practical assistance in the form of introductions to her contacts in the New York art world and full support of her brother [Alexander Cassatt].”14 Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 175–76. Claims that Durand-Ruel was “encouraged by Mary Cassatt” to assemble the show, like those made by Florence Gentner in her 2014 book about Durand-Ruel and the French impressionists, have reached too far in the opposite direction in their unsubstantiated implication that the artist instigated the idea;15 Florence Gentner, Les impressionnistes dans l’intimité de Paul Durand-Ruel (Paris: Chêne, 2014), 115. however, according to Jean Renoir, his father, the painter and sculptor Pierre-Auguste, “believed that Mary Cassatt had been indirectly responsible for the exhibition.”16 Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, trans. Randolph Weaver and Dorothy Weaver (London: Collins, 1962), 227. Elsewhere in this anthology, Hadrien Viraben discusses how Cassatt elected not to participate in outlets that would have promoted her importance to the story of impressionism. It is necessary to dig deeper, to puzzle out the specifics and complexities of the situation and thereby illuminate how Cassatt’s contributions could make a lasting impression on her contemporaries that has since been largely overlooked in twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship.
One of the primary confounding pieces of evidence is a letter that suggests she was initially reluctant to aid Durand-Ruel in his American endeavor. Exhibition plans began to take shape after James Sutton, a founder of the American Art Association, approached the French dealer around spring 1885.17 Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 142. That September, Cassatt wrote to her brother, who had been buying impressionist paintings with her guidance since 1881: “I have no doubt that you will see Durand-Ruel by the time you get this, for he wrote to me that he intended going to America & as I was in town a couple of weeks ago I called & gave him your address. He wanted me to give him a letter to you [sic] but I thought that quite unnecessary. The New York Art Association [has] offered him their rooms for an exhibition & he is going over to make arrangements—Affairs here he complains are at a stand still & he hopes to have better luck in America. I doubt it however.”18 Mary Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, September 21, [1885], in Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 195. On the surface, her expression of skepticism calls into question how central she could have been to the project, but some perspective on the status of her advising practice helps clarify her position.
During the mid-1880s, Cassatt’s cadre of active buyers was limited to family connections—her brothers, her parents, their extended family and business associates. The Havemeyers would not become a major force in the market until the 1890s. The only impressionist pictures they owned to date were individual works by Edgar Degas, Cassatt, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro that Louisine had purchased with Cassatt’s counsel as a young, single woman (figs. 1, 2). The seeds of their storied, lifelong friendship and collecting partnership were planted over the course of several visits when Cassatt, in Louisine’s words, “opened her heart to me about art while she showed me about the great city of Paris.”19 Louisine Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, ed. Susan Alyson Stein (New York: Ursus, 1993), 269–70. Upon marrying Harry in 1883, Louisine became occupied with family affairs and went on hiatus from buying contemporary French art with Cassatt until they reconnected in 1889, when the Havemeyers visited Paris for the Exposition universelle.
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Description: The Drawbridge, Amsterdam by Monet, Claude
Fig. 1. Claude Monet, The Drawbridge, Amsterdam, 1874. Oil on canvas, 53.3 × 63.5 cm (21 × 25 in.). Shelburne Museum, Vermont.
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Description: Fan Mount: The Cabbage Gatherers by Pissarro, Camille
Fig. 2. Camille Pissarro, Fan Mount: The Cabbage Gatherers, c. 1878–79. Gouache on silk, 16.5 × 52.1 cm (6 1/2 × 20 1/2 in.). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Leonora Brenauer Bequest, in memory of her father, Joseph B. Brenauer, 1994.
In the meantime, Cassatt learned the tools of the trade, purchasing pictures for herself and her relatives. By the time of her letter to Alexander in September 1885, she had experience buying from auctions, exhibitions, artist friends, and dealers. She realized through trial and error that the complexities of packing, shipping, insuring, and navigating customs to send works of art back to the United States were better left to professionals such as Durand-Ruel and the more minor dealer Alphonse Portier, with whom she was also associated. Durand-Ruel and Portier also proved to be advantageous partners in negotiation, especially in enabling her to preserve her collegial relationships with the artists in her circle. With the business acumen she absorbed in a family of financiers and industrialists, she quickly learned how to scout deals for her buyers and developed a persuasive sales pitch about the investment potential of modern art. Alexander would acquire some forty French impressionist pictures by the time of his death in 1906. Already, by 1885, he had at least three Manets, three Monets, two Degases, one Pissarro, and one Renoir, in addition to works by his sister.20 For a summary of Alexander Cassatt’s collection, see Suzanne G. Lindsay, Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1985). The more recently published catalogues raisonnés and Corey, “Mary Cassatt (1844–1926),” have updated the list of known works in his collection and clarified many dates of acquisition. Their parents, Katherine and Robert, owned Monet’s bold Green Wave, for which they had traded in The Beach at Trouville, and lived with the works Mary selected for her own enjoyment in the apartment they shared in Paris. She had also begun to expand her circle of influence to include Annie Riddle Scott, the daughter of Katherine’s cousin and widow of Alexander’s mentor at the Pennsylvania Railroad. On Cassatt’s recommendation, Scott bought three pictures from Édouard Manet’s estate in 1884, and by this date may have also owned examples of Degas’s work.21 Mary Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, January 5, 1884, in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle, 177. The Manet estate sale took place at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris, on February 4–5, 1884. Scott purchased Portrait of Emilie Ambré as Carmen, Young Girl en Dishabille, and Madame Loubens on Her Bed. The Degases in her collection were Ballet Scene and Characters of the Opéra. See Lindsay, Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia, 15. In April, Cassatt reported to her brother, “I will get the Monets for Mr Thompson [sic] if I can at the price, I know of one Annie Scott wanted to buy but thought it a little larger than she could find room for.”22 Mary Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, April 27, [1884], in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle, 184. Here she refers to Frank Thomson, another of Alexander’s business colleagues. He was probably the first collector to come to her primarily as a client, although the family connection was intrinsic to the professional one. Two months later, she purchased Monet’s Argenteuil, The Bridge under Repair, on Thomson’s account from Durand-Ruel and continued assisting him at least into fall 1886.23 For more on Thomson, see Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 139.
Given her experiences leading up to the New York exhibition, she may have still believed that personal relationships were essential to the promotion of avant-garde art that had yet to attain broad popular appeal. It was not until after 1889 that she began advising clients with whom she had no previous connection. She had encouraged her American collectors to lend to exhibitions in the United States by 1881, if not earlier, but the large scale of the dealer’s venture in 1886 could have struck her as inordinately ambitious.24 Cf. “When you get those pictures you will probably be the only person in Philad who owns specimens of either of the masters—Mames friends the Elders [in New York], have a Degas & a Pissarro & Mame thinks that there are no others in America—If exhibited at any of your Fine Art Shows they will be sure to attract attention.” Robert Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, April 18, 1881, in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle, 160–61. Moreover, she may have been wary of the timing. The American economy had been sunk in a depression since 1882 and had just weathered a panic in 1884. The economy started to rebound just in time for Durand-Ruel, who was seeking relief from his own financial distress.
Cassatt’s family background informed her perspective on the art market and gave her the resources to launch her own career and support her fellow artists. In 1886 she infused some of her own (family) funds into the last joint endeavors of the impressionists in Paris.25 Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, 101–2. She had been an active participant since Degas invited her to join in 1877 and channeled her organizational skills into helping rally group members.26 After Degas invited Cassatt to join the impressionist group in 1877, she participated in the exhibitions of 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886. For the final Impressionist Exhibition held in a gallery space at 1, rue Lafitte, in Paris, she, Degas, and Berthe Morisot were, according to her father, “the parties who put up the money for the rent & . . . responsible for all deficiency’s [sic] in expenses, & . . . entitled to all profits if there are any (needless to say they do not hope for or expect any).”27 Robert Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, May 5, 1886, in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle, 198. When he wrote this letter on May 5, 1886, the first venue of the New York exhibition had closed ten days earlier, and the second venue was set to open on May 25. The Paris exhibition, which opened on May 15, was staged almost in competition with the New York show. In her contribution to the catalogue for the 1986 centenary exhibition The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, Martha Ward explained how the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition was organized in part to construct an “independent identity . . . to separate from Durand-Ruel,” reverting closer to their autonomous origins just before they dispersed to exhibit individually and in larger venues, never again to organize their own group shows. The artists harbored concerns about the dealer’s promotional strategies, financial solvency, and relative monopoly over their market.28 Martha Ward, “The Eighth Exhibition 1886: The Rhetoric of Independence and Innovation,” in Moffett, New Painting, 421–23. That Cassatt provided backing to the Paris exhibition attests to her allegiance to her circle but should not be interpreted as a gesture of opposition to Durand-Ruel. Sweet wrote that Cassatt also lent Durand-Ruel money in 1886 “and undoubtedly by doing so [he] averted disaster.”29 Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, 103–4. It is unclear whether this funding had any direct connection to the New York project, but her support provided a life raft for the group, intended to buoy their promotional efforts from both sides of the Atlantic at this pivotal moment.
Durand-Ruel also relied on Cassatt to garner support for his American venture among her fellow artists. When appealing to Monet, who was the most dubious about the project, the dealer cited her as an authority on the potential for marketing impressionism in the United States. In November 1884 he wrote to Monet, “For ages Madame Cassatt has told me that you would have great success in New York. Business is so hopeless in Paris and the future so somber for everyone in France that I ask myself if I too should not seek to open a new market for our business, and I am convinced that the only good one is the United States.”30 Paul Durand-Ruel to Claude Monet, November 18, 1884, in Artcurial Paris, Archives Claude Monet: Correspondance d’artiste: Collection Monsieur et Madame Cornebois [auction catalogue] (December 13, 2006), 42. Present author’s translation. The following July he invited Monet to accompany him on his preparatory trip overseas and reiterated, “Miss Cassatt always told me that you would like it very much and that you would have great success.”31 Paul Durand-Ruel to Claude Monet, July 10, 1885, in Artcurial Paris, Archives Claude Monet, 45. Present author’s translation. Monet declined and continued to voice his reservations, responding at the end of July, “I confess that certain of these pictures I would regret to see sent to the land of the Yankees.”32 Monet to Durand-Ruel, July 28, 1885, trans. in Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 142. Full letter in Lionello Venturi, ed., Les archives de l’impressionnisme (Paris: Durand-Ruel, 1939), 1:294–95. In January 1886, still anxious, Monet inquired, “Do you really need quite so many paintings for America? Surely you already have a fair number? . . . You think only of America, while here we are forgotten, since every new painting you get you hide away. . . . Anyway, you doubtless have your reasons, but I deplore the disappearance of all my paintings like this.”33 Monet to Durand-Ruel, January 22, 1886, trans. in Richard Kendall, Monet by Himself (London: Macdonald, 1989), 116. Although Monet remained incredulous, Durand-Ruel’s appeals (in letters that came to light in 2006, when a collection of Monet’s correspondence was presented at auction) testify to the level of respect Cassatt had earned from her French peers, no small feat for an expatriate woman.
Cassatt’s advocacy for an American market for impressionist pictures was a form of her tacit support for the exhibition. More concretely, she introduced the dealer to American collectors. According to Durand-Ruel family lore, Cassatt even gave the dealer her address book.34 Archives Durand-Ruel, Paris. This claim has yet to be substantiated, and the address book is not known to be among the Durand-Ruel archives. The September 1885 letter provides evidence that she helped him contact her brother in Philadelphia, and this may have been when she made the introduction to the Havemeyers, who became, in Durand-Ruel’s own words, “our best client in America, and [their] admirable collection, which contains nothing but masterpieces, was largely built up through us.”35 See Gary Tinterow, “The Havemeyer Pictures,” in Frelinghuysen and Tinterow, Splendid Legacy, 8; Weitzenhoffer believes Louisine must have met Durand-Ruel before her marriage, but that is not necessarily the case (Weitzenhoffer, Havemeyers, 40). Quotation from Durand-Ruel and Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel, 158. The 1886 exhibition recaptured Louisine’s attention and helped prime her husband to appreciate avant-garde art. The couple would make their first purchase from Durand-Ruel—Manet’s The Salmon—on this occasion.36 Gretchen Wold, “Appendix,” in Frelinghuysen and Tinterow, Splendid Legacy, 354. Cassatt had drawn Louisine’s attention to Manet at the beginning of the decade, but she likely did not have any direct involvement in this acquisition. Instead, Samuel Colman, the American painter who served as Harry’s first advisor, recommended the picture, which was praised by critics as one of Manet’s most readable works.37 Tinterow, “Havemeyer Pictures,” in Frelinghuysen and Tinterow, Splendid Legacy, 8. The still-life subject matter may have been palatable to Harry because it recalled the Dutch old master pictures then in vogue among American collectors.38 Harry would go on to form an important collection of Rembrandts beginning in 1888, along with seven other Dutch pictures. See Walter Liedtke, “The Havemeyer Rembrandts,” in Frelinghuysen and Tinterow, Splendid Legacy, 62–65. The broad, painterly brushwork and compression of space differentiates this 1869 painting from seventeenth-century Dutch examples, albeit without straying too far from conventional taste.
Both Alexander and the Havemeyers agreed to lend paintings to the second venue of the New York exhibition. The Havemeyers contributed Louisine’s Monet and Pissarro, the two impressionist pictures she had not previously put on public view (see figs. 1, 2). Alexander lent seven pictures. The first listed in the catalogue was Manet’s Marine in Holland (fig. 3), which Mary gave him credit for choosing on his own in the winter of 1884–85, though she had already sent him at least two other works by the artist.39 Lindsay postulated that Mary may have selected the Manet for her brother at the time of the estate sale; however, both Merete Bodelsen’s account of the transaction and a later statement by Mary discredit Lindsay’s theory, as discussed in Corey, “Mary Cassatt (1844–1926).” See Lindsay, Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia, 14; and Merete Bodelsen, “Gauguin, the Collector,” Burlington Magazine 112, no. 810 (September 1970): 594, 608. He also contributed Degas’s Ballet Class (no. 299), which Mary selected for him from the artist’s studio and secured after much hassle through Durand-Ruel in June 1881 (fig. 4). There were also three Monets: Marine View with a Sunset (fig. 5; no. 300), which he bought in March 1883; probably Banks of the Zaan (fig. 6; no. 301 or 302), his first purchase from Durand-Ruel in April 1881; and another described as a river view of Holland (no. 301 or 302).40 This work is not identified in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonné, which identifies Banks of the Zaan (Wildenstein 174) as possibly no. 301, Banks of the Meuse, Holland; however, it could be no. 302, Boats on the Meuse, Holland, especially if The Zuiderkerk, Amsterdam (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Wildenstein 309), which does not feature boats, was also in the exhibition. The Cassatts owned the latter work by November 1883. It is also possible the unidentified Monet was a picture that has yet to be associated with the family’s collection, which is plausible given the incomplete records of their holdings. Finally, Alexander sent the only two works by his sister to be included in the exhibition, listed last in the catalogue as a Family Group (no. 309) and Portrait of a Lady (no. 310; fig. 7). The other named lender was Erwin Davis, with a work by the more conventional painter Ernest Ange Duez (no. 305), Degas’s Dancers in Pink (no. 304), and Manet’s Boy with a Sword (no. 303), which he had purchased from Durand-Ruel in 1881 through another American-artist-cum-intermediary, J. Alden Weir.41 Davis gave Boy with a Sword and Manet’s Young Lady in 1866 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1889. These would be the first Manets to enter not only an American public collection, but any museum. See entries on each work by Charles S. Moffett in Françoise Cachin and Charles S. Moffett, eds., Manet, 1832–1883 (Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1983), 75–78, 254–58. The lenders’ names gave credibility to Durand-Ruel’s enterprise by demonstrating to the New York audience that French impressionism had already been sanctioned by prominent members of their community.42 There was also one anonymous lender. Degas’s Behind the Scenes, no. 306, was “loaned from a private collection.” It is a testament to Cassatt’s role in initiating an American market for the New Painting that she advised two of the three.
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Description: Marine in Holland by Manet, Edouard
Fig. 3. Édouard Manet, Marine in Holland, 1872. Oil on canvas, 50.2 × 60.3 cm (19 3/4 × 23 3/4 in.). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1921.
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Description: Ballet Class by Degas, Edgar
Fig. 4. Edgar Degas, The Ballet Class, c. 1880. Oil on canvas, 82.2 × 76.8 cm (32 3/8 × 30 1/4 in.). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1937.
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Description: Marine View with a Sunset by Monet, Claude
Fig. 5. Claude Monet, Marine View with a Sunset, c. 1875. Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 65.1 cm (19 1/2 × 25 5/8 in.). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach, 1921.
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Description: Banks of the Zaan by Monet, Claude
Fig. 6. Claude Monet, Banks of the Zaan, 1871. Oil on canvas, 33 × 70 cm (13 × 27 9/16 in.). Private collection.
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Description: Katherine Cassatt Reading to her Grandchildren (La Lecture) by Cassatt, Mary
Fig. 7. Mary Cassatt, Katherine Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren, 1880. Oil on canvas, 55.9 × 100.3 cm (22 × 39 1/2 in.). Private collection.
Her contacts proved to be important—the Havemeyer connection nothing short of transformative—but her involvement in 1886 seems to have been limited to exhibition preparation and not the aftermath. Buyers of the forty-nine works sold included the Havemeyers and Davis, as well as William H. Fuller, A. W. Kingman, Cyrus Lawrence, and Albert Spencer, none of whom is known to have been acquainted with Cassatt at this time.43 Durand-Ruel and Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel, xi. Lawrence later collected Cassatt’s works. Although the exhibition generated an interest in impressionist art, the market did not erupt overnight. Pissarro wrote to his son, Lucien, in July 1886 that Durand-Ruel reported “he did not make a fortune with miraculous luck nor did he engage in sharp practice and have to decamp. He is very glad that he went to New York himself, and he has great hopes in possible developments there.”44 Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, [July 1886], in Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald, trans. Lionel Abel (Boston: Artworks, 2002), 77. The dealer recalled in a later interview, “Without America, I would have been lost, ruined, after having bought so many Monets and Renoirs. The two exhibitions there in 1886 saved me. The American public bought moderately, it is true, but thanks to that public Monet and Renoir were enabled to live and after that the French public followed suit.”45 Quoted in Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 136. Even if the venture did not have her unmitigated support, Cassatt was more than a minor player in his success. She helped equip Durand-Ruel with contacts, a sales pitch, and a purse that enabled him to forge a commercial path into the United States for the French impressionists. He staged two more exhibitions in the spring of the following year before establishing the New York outpost of his gallery in 1888, which stayed open until 1950.46 The gallery’s first branch in New York opened in 1888 at 297 Fifth Avenue at Thirty-First Street. In 1889 they moved north one block, to 315 Fifth Avenue. Five years later, they moved to a space they rented from the Havemeyers at 389 Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Sixth Street, where they would remain for a decade. See Durand-Ruel and Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel, 208.
For her part, Cassatt served as an American diplomat stationed at the heart of the market in France. She continued working with her family circle to enhance their collections during the remainder of the 1880s, but there is evidence she was beginning to think more broadly and optimistically about the American market, perhaps because of Durand-Ruel’s progress. Pissarro wrote to his son on May 16, 1887: “I intend to pay a visit to Miss Cassatt today or tomorrow; she is expecting a crowd from America, I will try to get her to support me; perhaps she might sell my work through [Hippolyte] Heymann,” another dealer in Paris.47 Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, May 16, 1887, in Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, ed. Janine Bailly-Herzberg (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1980–91), 2:170. Present author’s translation. Hippolyte Heymann (1845–1910) was a bookseller and minor picture dealer based in Paris. Her advising practice began to take off in the 1890s, and collectors from Chicago to Cleveland to Connecticut, in addition to Philadelphia and New York, sought her counsel. By the time of her death, she had a hand in exporting thousands of works of old master and French impressionist works to the United States. The 1886 New York exhibition was a turning point that invigorated her efforts to cultivate a taste for French impressionism, not just among friends and family, but across her home country. A few years later, she tested a far larger stage by encouraging the display of the New Painting at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which drew more than twenty-seven million visitors, a type of exposure that may have been inconceivable to her prior to 1886.48 Over the course of its six-month run, the exposition drew 27,529,400 visitors. Trumbull White and William Igleheart, The World’s Columbian Exposition: Chicago, 1893 (Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler, 1893), 632.
So, if this exhibition helped chart a new course for both Durand-Ruel and Cassatt, how did her integral part in realizing the project come to be obscured? The extant documentation is scattered, incomplete, and at times contradictory. While Durand-Ruel was keen to trade on Cassatt’s name when encouraging collectors and artists to support his mission, he was less generous with acknowledgment once plans were arranged. Perplexingly, he did not include a single one of her pictures in the first venue of the exhibition, and the two he borrowed for the second were listed last in the catalogue, separate from her brother’s other loans. Essentially, Cassatt’s own paintings were an afterthought.49 Works in Oil and Pastel, 59. He also gave her little mention in his memoirs; in contrast, Vollard raved in Recollections of a Picture Dealer, “Mary Cassatt! At the time of my first attempts, when I used to ask myself anxiously what the morrow would be like, how often did she get me providentially out of a difficulty!”50 Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, 180–81. Cassatt’s sense of propriety, shaped by expectations of her gender and class, and her desire to be seen foremost as an artist, led her to downplay her work behind the scenes. Witness her comment to Louisine in 1913 that Vollard “hasn’t forgotten Mr Havemeyer having saved his financial life in 1901,” ceding credit to her male patron.51 Mary Cassatt to Louisine Havemeyer, July 6, 1913, quoted in Weitzenhoffer, Havemeyers, 143. Nevertheless, by clearing the cobwebs of century-old personal and cultural biases to retrace her work through surviving correspondence, memoirs, and circumstantial evidence, it is possible to restore recognition of her role in providing crucial aid to the first large-scale impressionist exhibition in the United States. This accolade takes away nothing from her reputation as an artist, but instead enriches our portrait of the talented and enterprising Mary Cassatt.
 
1      Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, trans. Violet M. MacDonald (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2002), 180–81, quoted in Erica E. Hirshler, “Helping ‘Fine Things across the Atlantic’: Mary Cassatt and Art Collecting in the United States,” in Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, ed. Judith A. Barter (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 177. Aptly titled after Cassatt’s comment, Hirshler’s essay brought to light the extent of Cassatt’s efforts to propagate her taste, especially for impressionism, to American collectors. The present author’s dissertation, Laura D. Corey, “Mary Cassatt (1844–1926): Portrait of the Artist as Advisor and American Tastemaker” (PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2018), is the first comprehensive, chronological study of Cassatt’s advising practice. See also Laura D. Corey, “The Many Hats of Mary Cassatt: Artist, Advisor, Broker, Tastemaker,” in Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860–1940, ed. Lynn Catterson (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 39–57. »
2      On the Havemeyer collection, see Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Gary Tinterow, eds., Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993); and Frances Weitzenhoffer, The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America (New York: Abrams, 1986). »
3      The French critic Edmond Duranty described the movement as “la nouvelle peinture,” or “the new painting,” in an 1876 essay by that name, placing emphasis on the subject matter drawn from contemporary life and innovative style of painting. Translated in Charles S. Moffet, ed., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 37–47. »
4      Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel, eds., Paul Durand-Ruel: Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 224–25. The American Art Association gallery was located at 6 East Twenty-Third Street(until 1922). The association was founded in 1883 by James Sutton, R. Austin Robertson, and Thomas Kirby; in addition to being a gallery, it was the first auction house in the United States. The National Academy of Design was founded in 1825 and was located on Twenty-Third Street and Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South) from 1865 to 1899, its first permanent home down the block from the American Art Association. »
5      These were two of the four impressionist pictures she acquired prior to her marriage to Henry Osborne Havemeyer in 1883. The eleventh annual exhibition of the American Water Color Society held at the National Academy of Design, New York, from February 3 to March 3, 1878, is the first known public display of a Degas in the United States. See Phaedra Siebert, “Appendix: Selected Degas Exhibitions in America, 1878–1936,” in Degas and America: The Early Collectors, ed. Ann Dumas and David A. Brenneman (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2000), 248; Weitzenhoffer, Havemeyers, 41; Durand-Ruel and Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel, 224. On the American Watercolor Society, see Doreen Bolger Burke, “Painters and Sculptors in a Decorative Age,” in In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement, ed. Doreen Bolger Burke (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 315–16. For the American Exhibition of Foreign Products, Art and Manufactures in Boston, see Catalogue of the Art Department: Foreign Exhibition (Boston: Mills, Knight, 1883). »
6      See the exhibition catalogue Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris (New York: American Art Association and National Academy of Design, 1886). »
7      Luther Hamilton, “The Work of the Paris Impressionists in New York,” Cosmopolitan 1, no. 4 (June 1886): 240. »
8      Sylvie Patry, Christopher Riopelle, Joseph J. Rishel, Anne Robbins, and Jennifer A. Thompson, eds., Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market (Paris: Grand Palais, 2015). The exhibition was given different titles in each of the three venues: Paul Durand-Ruel, le pari de l’impressionnisme at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery, London; and Discovering the Impressionist: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. »
9      Her brother, Alexander, was the seventh president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. »
10      Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel wrote that she “assisted her dealer in this undertaking [the 1886 New York exhibition]; she introduced him to her childhood friend Louisine Havemeyer and her husband Henry Osborne Havemeyer, the ‘Sugar King.’” Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel, “Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922): A Portrait,” in Patry et al., Inventing Impressionism, 40; Jennifer A. Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” in Patry et al., Inventing Impressionism, 142–46. For more on Cassatt as a partner to Durand-Ruel in this catalogue, see Sylvie Patry, Anne Robbins, Christopher Riopelle, Joseph J. Rishel, and Jennifer A. Thompson, “Paul Durand-Ruel, an ‘Unrepentant Risk-Taker,’” in Patry et al., Inventing Impressionism, 14; and Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 137, 139, 149. »
11      Griselda Pollock, “The National Gallery Is Erasing Women from the History of Art,” The Conversation, June 3, 2015, https://bit.ly/3ePq774»
12      Michael Leja, “Impressionism and Nature’s Deceptions,” in Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 93–123. »
13      See Hirshler, “Helping ‘Fine Things across the Atlantic’”; Kevin Sharp, “How Mary Cassatt Became an American Artist,” in Barter, Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, 145–75; Achille Segard, Mary Cassatt: Un peintre des enfants et des mères (Paris: Libriarie Paul Ollendorff, 1913); Frederick A. Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, Impressionist from Pennsylvania (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); and Nancy Hale, Mary Cassatt (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975). »
15      Florence Gentner, Les impressionnistes dans l’intimité de Paul Durand-Ruel (Paris: Chêne, 2014), 115. »
16      Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, trans. Randolph Weaver and Dorothy Weaver (London: Collins, 1962), 227. »
17      Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 142. »
18      Mary Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, September 21, [1885], in Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 195. »
19      Louisine Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, ed. Susan Alyson Stein (New York: Ursus, 1993), 269–70. »
20      For a summary of Alexander Cassatt’s collection, see Suzanne G. Lindsay, Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1985). The more recently published catalogues raisonnés and Corey, “Mary Cassatt (1844–1926),” have updated the list of known works in his collection and clarified many dates of acquisition. »
21      Mary Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, January 5, 1884, in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle, 177. The Manet estate sale took place at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris, on February 4–5, 1884. Scott purchased Portrait of Emilie Ambré as Carmen, Young Girl en Dishabille, and Madame Loubens on Her Bed. The Degases in her collection were Ballet Scene and Characters of the Opéra. See Lindsay, Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia, 15. »
22      Mary Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, April 27, [1884], in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle, 184. »
23      For more on Thomson, see Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 139. »
24      Cf. “When you get those pictures you will probably be the only person in Philad who owns specimens of either of the masters—Mames friends the Elders [in New York], have a Degas & a Pissarro & Mame thinks that there are no others in America—If exhibited at any of your Fine Art Shows they will be sure to attract attention.” Robert Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, April 18, 1881, in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle, 160–61. »
25      Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, 101–2. »
26      After Degas invited Cassatt to join the impressionist group in 1877, she participated in the exhibitions of 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886. »
27      Robert Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt, May 5, 1886, in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle, 198. »
28      Martha Ward, “The Eighth Exhibition 1886: The Rhetoric of Independence and Innovation,” in Moffett, New Painting, 421–23. »
29      Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, 103–4. »
30      Paul Durand-Ruel to Claude Monet, November 18, 1884, in Artcurial Paris, Archives Claude Monet: Correspondance d’artiste: Collection Monsieur et Madame Cornebois [auction catalogue] (December 13, 2006), 42. Present author’s translation. »
31      Paul Durand-Ruel to Claude Monet, July 10, 1885, in Artcurial Paris, Archives Claude Monet, 45. Present author’s translation. »
32      Monet to Durand-Ruel, July 28, 1885, trans. in Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 142. Full letter in Lionello Venturi, ed., Les archives de l’impressionnisme (Paris: Durand-Ruel, 1939), 1:294–95. »
33      Monet to Durand-Ruel, January 22, 1886, trans. in Richard Kendall, Monet by Himself (London: Macdonald, 1989), 116. »
34      Archives Durand-Ruel, Paris. This claim has yet to be substantiated, and the address book is not known to be among the Durand-Ruel archives. »
35      See Gary Tinterow, “The Havemeyer Pictures,” in Frelinghuysen and Tinterow, Splendid Legacy, 8; Weitzenhoffer believes Louisine must have met Durand-Ruel before her marriage, but that is not necessarily the case (Weitzenhoffer, Havemeyers, 40). Quotation from Durand-Ruel and Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel, 158. »
36      Gretchen Wold, “Appendix,” in Frelinghuysen and Tinterow, Splendid Legacy, 354. »
37      Tinterow, “Havemeyer Pictures,” in Frelinghuysen and Tinterow, Splendid Legacy, 8. »
38      Harry would go on to form an important collection of Rembrandts beginning in 1888, along with seven other Dutch pictures. See Walter Liedtke, “The Havemeyer Rembrandts,” in Frelinghuysen and Tinterow, Splendid Legacy, 62–65. »
39      Lindsay postulated that Mary may have selected the Manet for her brother at the time of the estate sale; however, both Merete Bodelsen’s account of the transaction and a later statement by Mary discredit Lindsay’s theory, as discussed in Corey, “Mary Cassatt (1844–1926).” See Lindsay, Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia, 14; and Merete Bodelsen, “Gauguin, the Collector,” Burlington Magazine 112, no. 810 (September 1970): 594, 608. »
40      This work is not identified in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonné, which identifies Banks of the Zaan (Wildenstein 174) as possibly no. 301, Banks of the Meuse, Holland; however, it could be no. 302, Boats on the Meuse, Holland, especially if The Zuiderkerk, Amsterdam (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Wildenstein 309), which does not feature boats, was also in the exhibition. The Cassatts owned the latter work by November 1883. It is also possible the unidentified Monet was a picture that has yet to be associated with the family’s collection, which is plausible given the incomplete records of their holdings. »
41      Davis gave Boy with a Sword and Manet’s Young Lady in 1866 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1889. These would be the first Manets to enter not only an American public collection, but any museum. See entries on each work by Charles S. Moffett in Françoise Cachin and Charles S. Moffett, eds., Manet, 1832–1883 (Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1983), 75–78, 254–58. »
42      There was also one anonymous lender. Degas’s Behind the Scenes, no. 306, was “loaned from a private collection.” »
43      Durand-Ruel and Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel, xi. Lawrence later collected Cassatt’s works. »
44      Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, [July 1886], in Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald, trans. Lionel Abel (Boston: Artworks, 2002), 77. »
45      Quoted in Thompson, “Durand-Ruel and America,” 136. »
46      The gallery’s first branch in New York opened in 1888 at 297 Fifth Avenue at Thirty-First Street. In 1889 they moved north one block, to 315 Fifth Avenue. Five years later, they moved to a space they rented from the Havemeyers at 389 Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Sixth Street, where they would remain for a decade. See Durand-Ruel and Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel, 208. »
47      Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, May 16, 1887, in Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, ed. Janine Bailly-Herzberg (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1980–91), 2:170. Present author’s translation. Hippolyte Heymann (1845–1910) was a bookseller and minor picture dealer based in Paris. »
48      Over the course of its six-month run, the exposition drew 27,529,400 visitors. Trumbull White and William Igleheart, The World’s Columbian Exposition: Chicago, 1893 (Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler, 1893), 632. »
49      Works in Oil and Pastel, 59. »
50      Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, 180–81. »
51      Mary Cassatt to Louisine Havemeyer, July 6, 1913, quoted in Weitzenhoffer, Havemeyers, 143. »
10. Going Public: Mary Cassatt and the 1886 Impressionist Exhibition in New York
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