Mary Cassatt

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, a manufacturing town across the river from Pittsburgh that was later absorbed into that city ^[1]. Her father, Robert Simpson Cassatt, was a successful stockbroker and land speculator, and her mother, Katherine Kelso Johnston, came from a banking family and spoke fluent French. The household was prosperous, cultivated, and unusually mobile. One of her brothers, Alexander Johnston Cassatt, later became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad ^[2].

The family moved east to Philadelphia when Mary was a child, then spent several years in Europe during the early 1850s, living in Paris, Heidelberg, and Darmstadt. Those years gave her an early command of French and German and a first exposure to European painting, including the vast display of art at the Paris World's Fair of 1855 ^[1]. For anyone asking who was Mary Cassatt before she became a painter, the answer is a well-traveled daughter of the American upper middle class who had seen more of Europe by age eleven than most Americans saw in a lifetime.

At fifteen she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, one of the few American art schools that admitted women ^[2]. She studied there from 1860 to 1865 but grew impatient with the slow pace of instruction and the condescension directed at female students, who were barred from working with live male models. Convinced that serious training could only be had abroad, she persuaded her reluctant father to let her move to Paris in 1866 ^[1].

Because the École des Beaux-Arts did not accept women, Cassatt studied privately in Paris with the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme and spent long hours copying old masters in the Louvre, the standard self-education of the era ^[1]. Her persistence paid off quickly: in 1868 the official Paris Salon accepted her painting A Mandolin Player, exhibited under the name Mary Stevenson ^[3]. The Franco-Prussian War forced her back to the United States in 1870, an unhappy interlude during which she struggled to sell work and briefly considered giving up art altogether.

She returned to Europe in 1871 with a commission from the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh to copy paintings by Correggio in Parma, Italy ^[2]. The trip restored her finances and her confidence. She studied printmaking and the work of Correggio in Parma, traveled to Spain to absorb Velázquez and Rubens, and settled permanently in Paris in 1874, the same year the Impressionists held their first independent exhibition ^[1].

The decisive encounter of her career came through a shop window. Around 1875 she saw pastels by Edgar Degas displayed at a dealer's premises and later said the sight changed her life ^[3]. Degas, for his part, noticed her Salon submissions. In 1877, after Salon juries had rejected her recent work, he invited her to exhibit with the independent group known as the Impressionists. She accepted at once, later recalling that she finally could work with complete independence, without concern for a jury's opinion ^[1]. No other American artist received such an invitation.

Cassatt showed with the Impressionists in four of their eight exhibitions, in 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886 ^[3]. Her entries in the 1879 show, including the celebrated painting now known as Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878), on which Degas is believed to have worked directly, announced a fully modern painter: loose brushwork, tilted perspectives influenced by photography and Japanese prints, and an unsentimental attention to contemporary life ^[4]. Works such as In the Loge (1878) and Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge examined women as active spectators at the Paris Opéra rather than passive objects of display.

From the 1880s onward she concentrated on the subject that defined her reputation: mothers, children, and the ordinary intimacies of domestic life. Paintings like The Child's Bath (1893), now at the Art Institute of Chicago, treated bathing, reading, and tea-taking with the seriousness other painters reserved for history subjects ^[4]. Among Mary Cassatt achievements, critics rank her 1890 to 1891 series of ten color prints especially high. Inspired by an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, she produced drypoint and aquatint images, including The Letter and Woman Bathing, that are widely regarded as landmarks of Western printmaking ^[5].

Recognition followed on both continents. In 1893 she painted a large mural, Modern Woman, for the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a work now lost ^[2]. The French state honored her with the Legion of Honor in 1904 ^[1]. Just as consequential was her role as adviser to American collectors, above all her friend Louisine Havemeyer, whose collection, assembled largely on Cassatt's guidance, eventually enriched the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ^[6]. Through such counsel she did as much as any dealer to bring Degas, Manet, Monet, and the old Spanish masters into American museums.

Cassatt never married. She judged marriage incompatible with a serious career, a conclusion many professional women of her generation reached, and she guarded her independence carefully ^[1]. Her family remained central to her world: her parents and her sister Lydia moved to Paris in 1877 and lived with her, and Lydia sat for many of her finest early pictures until her death from Bright's disease in 1882, a loss that halted Cassatt's work for a time ^[2].

Her friendship with Degas was the longest and most complicated relationship of her life. The two shared a studio neighborhood, exchanged techniques in pastel and printmaking, and sat for one another; Degas made a well-known portrait of Cassatt holding cards, which she came to dislike ^[3]. Whether the bond was ever romantic is unknown, since both burned much of their correspondence, and scholars generally describe it as a demanding professional friendship between equals that survived quarrels, including a rupture over the Dreyfus Affair, in which Cassatt sided with Dreyfus ^[1].

She was also a committed supporter of women's suffrage. In 1915 she contributed eighteen works to an exhibition in New York organized by Louisine Havemeyer to benefit the suffrage campaign, a public political gesture that angered some conservative members of her own family ^[6].

In 1894 Cassatt bought the Château de Beaufresne at Le Mesnil-Théribus, a village northwest of Paris in the Oise, and it remained her country home for the rest of her life ^[2]. Her late paintings and pastels continued the mother-and-child theme with broader handling and stronger color, and dealers in New York, notably Durand-Ruel, kept her work before American audiences.

Her final two decades brought accumulating losses. Her brother Alexander died in 1906, and a trip to Egypt in 1910 to 1911 with her brother Gardner ended with his fatal illness, an episode that left her physically and emotionally exhausted ^[1]. Diabetes, rheumatism, and cataracts progressively undermined her health. Repeated cataract operations failed to save her sight, and by around 1914 she was forced to stop making art almost entirely ^[4].

Blind in her last years but mentally sharp, she remained at Beaufresne through the First World War era, receiving visitors and following the art world through friends. Mary Cassatt died at the château on June 14, 1926, at the age of eighty-two, and was buried in the family vault at Le Mesnil-Théribus ^[2].

Cassatt occupies a double position in art history: a central figure of French Impressionism and a founder of a serious tradition of American women artists. Basic Mary Cassatt facts make the point plainly. She was the only American painter to exhibit with the Impressionists in Paris, and with Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond she was one of only three women at the core of the movement ^[3]. Her prints, in particular the 1890 to 1891 color series, influenced generations of printmakers and remain fixtures of museum print rooms ^[5].

Her paintings now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris ^[4]. Major retrospectives, including exhibitions organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1990s, reestablished her as an innovator rather than a painter of merely charming subjects, and feminist art historians since the 1970s, notably Griselda Pollock, have examined how she turned the restricted spaces available to bourgeois women into the very substance of modern painting ^[7].

Her influence also survives in the collections she helped shape. The Havemeyer bequest to the Metropolitan Museum, guided over decades by her eye, remains one of the greatest gifts of European art ever made to an American institution ^[6]. Any Mary Cassatt biography ends with that double achievement: the pictures she made, and the taste she formed. In 1966 her painting The Boating Party appeared on a United States postage stamp, and her childhood region honored her as one of Pennsylvania's most distinguished artists ^[2].