The artist and the Opéra : Manet, Degas, Cassatt

Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt had unique visions of the Paris Opera House. Thus each artist perceived and portrayed the pageant of fashionable contemporary life at the Opera from diverse perspectives. Manet rendered a singular image of this world, that of a masked ball, which elicits an extraordinary insight into the manners and mores of an era. The focus by Degas on the dancers on stage invites a penetrating look into the spectacle of the performance from exceptional viewpoints. Mary Cassatt's depictions, exclusively of the female spectators in the audience, intimate a serious reflection of her earnest feminist attitudes.From the costumed revellers in the foyer, to the brilliant presentation on stage to the elegant spectators in the loges, these images inspired by the Opera endure as remarkably distinctive