Mary Cassatt 'The Loge' 1878-1880 Exhibition Poster Print

The Loge shows two young women in a private box at the theatre, dressed for the evening and watching the performance with a mixture of attention and reserve. Painted between 1878 and 1880, it is one of the finest of Mary Cassatt’s theatre pictures and a clear statement of her place inside French Impressionism.

Cassatt was the rare outsider Edgar Degas brought into the circle. An American from Pennsylvania who settled in Paris, she was the only American, and one of very few women, to exhibit with the Impressionists. Degas saw her work, sought her out, and the two became lifelong friends and frequent sparring partners. The opera box was a favourite Impressionist subject because it staged modern Parisians looking at one another under artificial light, but Cassatt’s angle was her own: she was interested in the woman doing the looking, not the woman on display. The Loge becomes a study of composure and attention, of young women self-possessed in a public space designed for display.

Her influence extended well beyond her own canvases. In later life she steered wealthy American friends towards buying Impressionist pictures, which is a large part of why so many now hang in museums across the United States. She worked confidently in oil, pastel and printmaking, and her colour prints in particular show a debt to the Japanese woodblock prints then circulating in Paris.

Our poster imagines a 1950s London exhibition, using the restrained typography of mid-century British gallery announcements. The layout gives the painting room to hold the viewer’s eye, much as its two figures hold their own attention on the stage beyond the frame.

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