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Mary Cassatt (1844 - 1926)

Mary Cassatt, an American painter who spent much of her life in France, was born into a wealthy upper-middle class family in Pennsylvania. As a young child, she spent a few years with her family in Paris and surprised her parents with her wish to become an artist, a rare ambition, and rarer career, for a nineteenth-century woman.

From 1861 to 1865, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She moved to France in 1866 and lived there the rest of her life. Like other artists, she began to develop her art by copying the old masters in the Louvre. She showed strong draftsmanship skills and was invited to exhibit in the 1874 Paris Salon.

When Edgar Degas saw her light, bright colors and sketchy brushstrokes, he invited her to join the Impressionist movement. Cassatt was a late recruit to the Impressionists and although she is well known in America, she is still sometimes excluded, along with another female painter, Berthe Morisot, from the Impressionist pantheon in Europe.

Cassatt continued to develop her painting in the Impressionist style in the late 1870s and she first exhibited with the group in 1879. Like her fellow Impressionists, Cassatt painted scenes of people engaged in the ordinary daily activities of modern life. Although she had no children of her own, she was an especially gifted painter of women and children, as seen in paintings such as Children Playing on the Beach, 1886, and The Bath, 1891.

Her undated pastel, Mother and Child, shows the influenced of Degas in its detailed observation, which was not to be found amongst her other Impressionist contemporaries. Like Degas, Cassatt also often arranged her compositions asymmetrically, in order to make them seem lifelike and informal.

In the 1890s, Cassatt created a series of beautiful prints, such as Summertime, 1894 and The Letter, 1890-91. With strong outlines and flattened, simplified shapes, these prints show the influence of Japanese woodcuts.

She had one other thing in common with her friend and mentor Degas — poor eyesight. When she died in 1926 at the age of 82 she was blind.

Mary Cassatt
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Mother and Child

Mother and Child

 Children Playing on the Beach

Children Playing on the Beach

 Breakfast in Bed

Breakfast in Bed

 The Bath

The Bath

 Summertime, c. 1894

Summertime, c. 1894

 Susan Comforting the Baby

Susan Comforting the Baby

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