Mary Cassatt

The daughter of a socially-prominent Pittsburgh broker, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) first studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1861 to 1865 before traveling extensively in Europe, often in pursuit of further formal instruction. She settled permanently in France in 1875; at various points, members of her wealthy family joined her on both temporary and permanent bases. As her mother and her sister suffered from ill-health, Cassatt was obliged from time to time to turn away from her work in order to oversee their care.

Unable to study at the École des Beaux-Arts because of her gender, Cassatt drifted away from traditional academic styles. More and more, she found herself drawn to a group of artists who came to be known as The Impressionists, a group that included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. The work of the Impressionists represented a departure from the careful draftsmanship, perspective, and modeling of the Academy, and critics responded to this new radical direction in art with both outrage and scorn. After suffering rejection from the Paris Salon, the annual state-supported exhibition juried by conservative French artists, Monet, Renoir, Degas, and others began exhibiting independently as a group in 1874. Their unconventional color choices, radical flattening of space, unorthodox compositions, abrupt cropping of objects, and subjects drawn from modern life shocked the public.

Invited by Degas, Cassatt joined the Impressionists in 1877 and exhibited with them from 1879 to 1886, when the group broke up. She was the only American and the only woman to exhibit with the French Impressionists. She was particularly influenced by the work of Degas; they developed a strong friendship marked by mutual admiration and sometimes heated exchanges about the nature of painting. Although Cassatt was quoted as saying that the “first sight of Degas’[s] pictures was the turning point in [her] artistic life,” she also described disagreements that led to long silences and eventual reconciliations (Barter, Judith A. Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1998, p. 109).

As a single woman, Cassatt was unable to frequent many of the cafés and nightclubs that her male counterparts depicted in their paintings. The painter primarily produced images of mothers and their children, often using family and friends, in fresh, modern, and seemingly unposed ways. She was extraordinarily talented at rendering children naturally, making them recognizable as children rather than miniature adults. Other than the mother-and-child images for which she is best-known, Cassatt concentrated her attention on modern leisure activities: couples boating, ladies attending the opera, and families enjoying the park.

There is a marked sense of spontaneity in Cassatt’s work: children casually yet charmingly sprawled in a chair, or a young woman whose face is hidden for a moment by her teacup. Cassatt’s avant-garde approach to composition also set her work apart; she often grouped objects close together and close to the picture plane, rather than spaced out in an even and orderly manner.

Cassatt’s work in the 1890s demonstrates the profound effects of her exposure to Japanese prints, which were at the time wildly in vogue in Paris. She herself collected Japanese woodblock prints and executed a series of prints with the muted colors and flat planes evident in the work of artists such as Hiroshige and Utamaro. She did not confine this sense of experimentation to printmaking, however; her paintings of the 1890s demonstrate a similarly innovative approach to the treatment of space, perspective, and color.

In 1893, Cassatt was invited to create a mural for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Cassatt’s mural, on the subject of “Modern Woman,” depicted girls in contemporary dress engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and the study of the arts. The mural was later either lost or destroyed.

Cassatt was plagued by illness in her later years; her failing eyesight was particularly disheartening. Cassatt died at her country home near Paris in 1926. Her fame and fine reputation as an artist, already firmly established at the time of her death, experienced a revival of interest in the 1960s and ’70s as scholars and artists began focusing more and more on the contributions of women to the development of modern art both in this country and abroad.