Modern Age
Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)
American Impressionism painter.
Mary Cassatt was the American who became a Parisian Impressionist. Born to a prosperous Pittsburgh family, she trained in Philadelphia and then in Europe, and settled permanently in France. Rejected and frustrated by the official Salon, she was invited by Edgar Degas to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1879 — the only American, and one of only a handful of women, in the group. Degas became her difficult, decisive mentor and friend.
Her great subject was the modern private life of women: mothers and children, women at the theatre, at tea, reading, or bathing a child — treated not as sentimental Madonnas but with cool observation and monumental design. In 1890 a large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris overwhelmed her, and she responded with a suite of ten color prints (drypoint and aquatint) that adapt the flat pattern, cropped view, and outlined form of ukiyo-e to bourgeois French interiors — among the most original prints of the century.
Cassatt was also a powerful force in American taste: she advised the collector Louisine Havemeyer and other Americans, steering great Impressionist and Old Master pictures into United States museums. Failing eyesight ended her work around 1914, and she died near Paris in 1926.
The words the record keeps using: intimate, tender, dignified, observant, modern, unsentimental.
At a glance
- Lived 1844–1926
- Origin American
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Engraving and etching, Pastel
- Techniques Etching with drypoint, Aquatint
Works in the archive
- Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A bored little girl sprawls sideways across a big blue-upholstered chair, a small dog asleep nearby. Degas advised on the picture and reportedly reworked part of the background, and it marks Cassatt's arrival as an… - The Letter, 1890 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A woman seals an envelope at a writing desk, from Cassatt's celebrated set of ten color prints of 1890–91. Made in direct response to the Japanese woodblock prints she had just seen in Paris, it translates ukiyo-e —… - The Child's Bath, 1893 (Art Institute of Chicago)
A woman, seen from a steep bird's-eye angle, holds a small child on her lap and washes its feet in a basin. It is Cassatt's masterpiece of the maternal theme and her most complete fusion of Japanese design with Western… - The Boating Party, 1893 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A dark-clad oarsman, seen from behind, rows a mother and baby across sunlit blue water. Unusually large and boldly designed for Cassatt, it was painted on the Riviera and shows how completely she had absorbed the flat…
What was said
Cassatt treated the mother-and-child theme and the private lives of women as serious modern subjects, observed with dignity and candor rather than religious or sentimental convention — an aim recorded in her conversations with her biographer and echoed throughout her letters.
Cassatt recalled first encountering Degas's pastels in a dealer's window and returning to press her face to the glass and absorb them, describing the experience as one that changed the direction of her art; Degas's subsequent invitation to exhibit with the independents freed her from the Salon jury.
After the 1890 exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris, Cassatt wrote to Berthe Morisot urging her to come and see them, insisting that anyone who wanted to make color prints could dream of nothing more beautiful — the enthusiasm that launched her own color-print suite.
Lineage
Learned from Katsushika Hokusai, Edgar Degas, Kitagawa Utamaro
What would Mary make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Mary Cassatt", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Mary · Keep a life moment the way Mary would · Pictures made after Mary