Louisine Havemeyer

Louisine Havemeyer assembled one of the greatest private collections in the world on Mary Cassatt's advice, gave almost all of it to the Metropolitan Museum, and went to prison for suffrage at sixty-three. She met Cassatt in Paris as a teenager and bought a Degas pastel with her own pocket money in 1875, which is thought to be the first Degas to enter an American collection. She married the sugar magnate Henry Havemeyer, and for thirty years the two of them bought on Cassatt's guidance - Manet, Monet, Courbet, Corot, Cezanne, and a group of El Grecos and Goyas that Cassatt hunted down in Spain when almost no American cared about Spanish painting. Nearly two thousand objects went to the Metropolitan on her death and are the foundation of its European holdings. She was also a militant suffragist: she organised exhibitions of Cassatt and Degas to fund the campaign, spoke across the country, and in 1919 was arrested for burning an effigy of President Wilson outside the White House and served three days in the Occoquan workhouse, then toured with the Prison Special in the prison uniform. She wrote a memoir published after her death that is candid about how the collection was actually made. She and Cassatt fell out for a period over the Dreyfus affair and over money, and were reconciled. The bequest arrived at the Metropolitan in 1929 with the condition that the works be shown rather than stored. Her Degas holdings alone numbered around sixty-five. The memoir, Sixteen to Sixty, was written for her family and published in full only in 1961; it records which pictures Cassatt made her buy against her own judgement and which she was right about. She said the vote was worth three days in a workhouse.

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