Art in a Mirror: The Counterproofs of Mary Cassatt.

Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed something a bit strange about a number of the illustrations for this article: they appear to have been printed in reverse. If you carefully examine the lower left corner of Plate II, The Banjo Lesson, you will find the work is signed "Mary Cassatt"--but backwards. If you were able to see the picture in person, you would discover that the signature does in fact read backwards. That is because the artworks featured in this article (except for Pls. I and VI) are actually counterproofs (reverse impressions) of pastels by the American-born impressionist artist Mary Cassatt. Forty-eight counterproofs never before displayed publicly are featured in an exhibition currently on view at Adelson Galleries in New York City. (1) Among other revelations, the exhibition includes seven compositions that will be new to even the most enthusiastic Cassatt admirer, for they were made from unrecorded pastels.

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The counterproof process has rarely been studied as a discrete area, and little attention has been paid to the counterproofs of Cassatt's pastels. A counterproof is created by placing a damp sheet of blank paper over an artwork, such as a pastel or a not-yet-dry etching, and applying pressure, usually by running the sheets through a printing press. The pressure causes a mirror impression of the original image to be transferred to the moistened paper: Thus, the damp sheet that was laid over and pressed against Cassatt's pastel The Banjo Lesson (Pl. I) became imprinted with the counterproof image that is now the work illustrated as Plate II. Surprisingly, more than one counterproof can be pulled from a single work, as with Plates III and IV, both reverse impressions of the Cassatt pastel entitled Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 2), last known to be in a private collection. Moreover, it is often difficult to tell that a counterproof was taken from a pastel, because to the untutored eye the original pastel's surface remains largely unaffected. (2)

The counterproof process has long been employed by printmakers, for the reversed image that results is useful for comparison with the preparatory drawing or plate from which a print is being made. Eventually, some artists began to hand color counterproofs of engravings after their works. In the case of the German artist-naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), for example, these handtinted counterproofs quite closely resemble her delicate watercolors of flowers. (3) Other artists also made counterproofs of their chalk drawings and pastels as well as paintings in watercolor and gouache. During the rococo period in France, many painters, including Jean Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) and Francois Boucher (1703-1770), experimented with chalk drawings, pulling counterproof impressions and at times reworking them with chalk additions.