Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), American painter, who lived and worked in France as an important member of the Impressionist group.

Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. In 1861 she began to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, but in 1866 proclaimed her independence by leaving to paint in France. By 1872, after studying in the major museums of Europe, her style began to mature, and she settled in Paris. There her work attracted the attention of the French painter Edgar Degas, who invited her to exhibit with his fellow Impressionists. One of the works she showed was The Cup of Tea (1879, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a portrait of her sister Lydia in luminescent pinks. Beginning in 1882 Cassatt's style took a new turn. Influenced, like Degas, by Japanese woodcuts, she began to emphasize line over mass and experimented with asymmetrical composition—as in The Boating Party (1893, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.)—and informal, natural gestures and positions. Mothers and children in intimate relationship and domestic settings became her chosen theme. Her portraits were not commissioned; instead, she used members of her own family as subjects.

France awarded Cassatt the Legion of Honour in 1904; although she had been instrumental in advising the first American collectors of Impressionist works, recognition came more slowly in the United States. Owing to the loss of her eyesight, she was unable to paint after 1914.