Cassatt, Mary

Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926), artist and member of the Impressionist movement.Born into an upper‐class Pennsylvania family, Cassatt as a child spent four years in France and Germany. She enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at age sixteen but was determined to seek training abroad. She traveled to Europe with her mother in 1865 and, except for a brief return to the United States in 1870–1871 and several short trips home, remained there for the rest of her life, moving permanently to Paris in 1874. Cassatt studied with the conservative artists Jean‐Léon Gérôme and Charles Chaplin but became dissatisfied with submitting her work for exhibition to the Paris Salon, perceiving that its juries were prejudiced against women artists. She accepted Edgar Degas's invitation to join the Impressionists in 1877 and first exhibited with them in 1879.

Cassatt belonged to a cultured intellectual circle in Paris, although her gender and class prevented her from close interaction with her contemporaries in the cafés of Paris, the symbol of modern life for some impressionist artists. Her first painting of a mother and child, in 1888, announced a theme with which she became increasingly identified. Cassatt continued to paint until 1915, when poor eyesight forced her to stop. Cassatt also served as art adviser to her friends Louisine and Henry O. Havemeyer, whose collection of Impressionist and old master paintings was eventually donated to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
See also Painting: To 1945.

Bibliography

Nancy Mowll Mathews , Mary Cassatt: A Life, 1994.
Judith Barter et al. , Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, 1998.

Bailey Van Hook