Mary Cassatt
Watch this video, which discusses the American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) and her painting In the Loge, which she painted in 1878.
In 19th-century France, the gaze of the observer – whether on Napoleon's grand new boulevards or in the opera – was very often structured by issues of economic status. Mary Cassatt's remarkable painting In the Loge (c. 1878-79) clearly shows the complex relationship between the gaze, public spectacle, gender, and class privilege.
Cassatt was a wealthy American artist who had adopted the style of the Impressionists while living in Paris. Here she depicts a fashionable upper-class woman in a box seat at the Paris Opera (the sitter is Cassatt's sister, Lydia). Lydia is shown holding opera glasses up to her eyes, but instead of tilting them down, as she would if she were watching the performance below, her gaze is level. She peers straight across the chamber, perhaps at another audience member. Look closely, and you will notice that a gentleman is gazing at her from one of the boxes across the room. Lydia is caught between his gaze and ours even as she spies another.
Source: Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/impressionism/v/mary-cassatt-in-the-loge-1878
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