Mary Cassatt at Work: Feminist Pioneer

Get ready for the Mary Cassatt retrospective at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. The exhibit focuses on the prime years of Cassatt’s creativity, roughly the late 1870s to late 1890s. Although American born, Cassatt was a mover and shaker in the French impressionist world as the only American in that circle which included Degas, Pissarro and Morisot.  

Cassatt never married or had children; her paintings of everyday women and children were especially important at a time when women were moving into new territory such as voting rights, social progress and educational opportunities. Through her artistic brilliance these paintings displayed the subject’s dignity without sentimentalism.    

Richard Cutler joined the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Docent Program in 2018, after a 42-year career as an Emergency Physician with Kaiser Permanente. Beyond his clinical work, Richard served as a Director of the Permanente Medical Group, concentrating on specialty Access and Strategy. In this later role, he gave hundreds of lectures to physician groups on innovations in specialty care delivery. 

Richard’s interest in Art and Antiquities started in at an early age with regular trips with his mother to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As an undergraduate, he focused on Art History, culminating with a semester on Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. Richard has been an avid Museum goer ever since and enjoys sharing with museum visitors the cultural and historical context of artworks to enhance their enjoyment of the Fine Arts of San Francisco’s collections. 

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) are comprised of two iconic sites in San Francisco’s beautiful parks- the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and Legion of Honor Museum in Lincoln Park. As the largest public arts institution in the western United States, the Museums house a world-class collection of 151,000 artworks that span more than 5,000 years.  

The JCCSF and FAMSF have collaborated for over a decade, and we are grateful that FAMSF graciously shares the beauty and history of their collections with the community through inspiring educational docent talks.