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5.3. Working with texts. Mary Robinson Cassatt

DropDown Activity

5.3.1. Read the text and then complete it with the missing words. There is one extra word. 

Painter, dealer, etching, visitors, theme, leading, opinion, fine, facts, freedom, returned, established, used

Mary Cassatt became one of the (1) impressionist artists at a time, when women were not yet destined for an artistic career. Mary Cassatt’s life and work are full of controversial  (2) She always called herself an American (3) , although she lived most of her adult life in Paris. Also, her favourite artistic (4)  was mothers and their children, although, she remained unmarried and childless. She (5)  the name Mary Stevenson as her art name in Paris in the late 1860s and 1870s. Stevenson was actually her middle name and in her (6)  it sounded more ’American’ than Cassatt.

She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of (7)  Arts in Philadelphia and when the first Impressionist art exhibition was opened in the United States in 1886,  Cassatt was one of the first (8) She said she went there to learn.  She also studied and worked in Paris, then briefly (9)  to Pennsylvania. The artistic (10) she enjoyed while living abroad was nowhere to be experienced in America. She tried to sell some of her paintings in New York, but without success. When she tried again to sell them through a (11)  in Chicago, the paintings were tragically destroyed in a fire in 1871.  Then she was able to restart her career in Europe. The Paris Salon accepted her paintings for exhibitions in 1872, 1873 and 1874, and eventually she became a(n) (12)  artist. She continued to study and paint in Spain, Belgium and Rome, eventually settling permanently in Paris.

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5.3.2. Match the paintings with the titles. Which of Cassatt’s paintings do you like the best? Why?

   
 
   

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Question

5.3.3. Find the odd-word-out from these lists of words below. 

1.

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Sculptor

painter

engraver

carpenter

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2.

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Still life

art life

portrait

study

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3.

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Impressionism

surrealism

egoism

dadaism

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4.

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Paint

brush

easel

weasel

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5.

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Gallery

exhibition hall

show

museum

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6.

Answers

violet

pear

orange

lilac

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5.3.4  Do you know famous art museums in England and the United States?  Where are these galleries? London? New York City? Washington D.C.?

Royal Academy of Arts
The Brooklyn Museum
National Gallery
Guggenheim Museum
National Portrait Gallery
Museum of Modern Art
Art Museum of the Americas
Tate Modern
Barbican Art Gallery
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
National Gallery of Art

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