Miranda: English II, Section F

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Mary Cassatt, 1878

This painting makes me feel so relaxed; it kind of makes me want to go into the picture and fall asleep on one of the blue armchairs.

Question: Why??

Answer: The cool colors and the dim lighting in the room makes it seem like a room that has the shades down, so that some light still peeps through, but not a lot. The room is very simple and there are several blue armchairs, which makes the viewer relaxed because the room is calm and simple, and there is not a lot of variety in it. The girl’s pale, creamy skin, and her calm, dreamy expression, also serve to calm the viewer. The sleeping dog, paired with the little girl who seems like she is about to fall asleep adds a relaxing tone to the painting, because they must be in a calm environment in order to be asleep or falling asleep. This picture is very realistic in its style, and similarly to “ The Child’s Bath” the dog and the girl stand out from the rest of the painting because of their contrast in coloring and the fact that they are more detailed than the dim background. This painting is also more realistic in another sense, the fact that it almost seems to be a candid photograph. If this painting were a portrait, the girl and the dog would have been expected to be either sitting or standing upright, and staring directly at the painter. In this painting however, they are very relaxed in that the dog is laying down and the girl’s posture is slumped as if she was about to fall asleep. The dreamy look in the girl’s eyes is very important to the relaxation and calmness of the painting, because it displays, beyond her posture, how relaxed she is. This painting, and the realism that it displays would have been a very revolutionary painting for its time, as were many other of Mary Cassatt’s paintings because it displays an unbelievable realism in the gestures and positions of the girl and the dog, and the calmness and dimness in the room provides a sense of relaxation for the viewer.

One more thing, the fact that the little girl seems to be dressed very formally, as if she had just gotten home from a formal event, makes me even more relaxed, because I can relate to the feeling when you have just come home from a very long, formal event, and you just want to lie down and fall asleep. The realism seen in the exhaustion of the little girl is very relatable and it makes me think that she is so cute and relaxed with her pale cheeks and her thoughtful, dreamy expression.

This version of the painting, found on another site, is so bright in color that it makes me feel almost sick in comparison to the relaxation portrayed in the other painting. I think that this is an excellent example of the way that color hues in a painting can really affect the viewer and the overall feeling of the painting. I also feel that the harsh detail in the different colors of the chair that the girl is sitting in adds to the feeling of sickness that I get when I look at this picture. The other picture (the first one) seems to have a sheet of dimness and calm thrown over it. In the second, however, the different colors seem to harsh and the environment seems very disturbing to me, in contrast with the utter relaxation that I felt when looking at the first version of the painting. I don’t know why I feel so strongly about this, and I don’t even know which version of the painting is more like Mary Cassatt’s original painting, but, when I compare the first to the second, I feel such a difference in the feelings that the painting give off, when I compare them to each other. It would be interesting to see what other people think about this, because I feel so strongly that these different versions of the same painting are so different from each other, and I don’t know why I feel that way, but I do.

p.s. Blogs 19 and 20 were posted a day late, all blogs for the week should have been posted yesterday (Saturday) but these blogs were posted today (Sunday) (I am sorry).