Explore the Comparisons to male artists and authors about the Comparisons of this artwork, The Tea.
John Loughery argues that while Cassatt’s The Tea uses similar setting and subjects as explored in other literary and artistic works of the time, the emotional response Cassatt’s painting evokes is different. For instance, compared to the work of American-British author Henry James and American artist William Merritt Chase, Loughery says that Cassatt's painting is "a good deal more mysterious, or at least less conventional, in its space and composition than numerous other genteel genre scenes." Unlike other late 19th-century works examining domestic space, Cassatt allows her viewers to feel unsettled towards her subjects and their conditions. Loughery admits uncertainty about whether Cassatt intended her work to stimulate such emotions and serve as a deep social commentary, questioning whether or not "Cassatt might have more in common with Renoir and Pissarro than the deeper Manet and Degas."
Furlong-Clancy also draws a connection between The Tea and Gustave Caillebotte’s Luncheon (1876) which also depicts a bourgeois home full of expensive “silverware, glassware, and dining and entertaining formalities.”
Henry James William Merritt Chase Degas Gustave Caillebotte Pissarro Gustave Caillebotte’s Renoir Manet