Mary Cassatt
The Impressionist of motherhood.
Mary Cassatt was an American who exhibited with the Impressionists in Paris. She painted women’s lives: reading, drinking tea, with children.
Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 near Pittsburgh in the United States into a wealthy family. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia but found the teaching too limited. In 1866 she travelled to Paris, where women were not allowed to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. She took private lessons and copied in the Louvre. She also travelled to Italy and Spain and studied the old masters. In 1874 she settled in Paris for good.
Cassatt had paintings accepted by the Salon but grew tired of its rules. In 1877 Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists, and she took part in four of their exhibitions. She and Degas became close friends and influenced each other, even though the relationship was at times stormy. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878), now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, shows a child slumped wearily in a large armchair.
Cassatt depicted women’s lives in the bourgeois world: women reading, drinking tea, going to the theatre or caring for children. From the 1880s mother and child became her principal subject. The pictures are tender but unsentimental. After a large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris in 1890 she made a series of colour prints with simple lines and flat patterns. They are counted among her finest works. She also worked a great deal in pastel.
Cassatt never married. She lived close to her family, who moved to Paris. She advised American collectors, especially the Havemeyer family, and thereby helped many Impressionist works find their way into American museums. She supported the campaign for women’s suffrage. Diabetes and cataracts forced her to stop working around 1914.
Cassatt died in 1926 in France. She is the best-known American Impressionist and an important figure in helping the new French art gain a foothold in the United States.