Mary Cassatt, whose given name was Mary Stevenson Cassatt, was an American painter and printmaker who was a part of the Impressionist group working in and around Paris. She was born on May 22, 1844, in Allegheny City (now a part of Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, and she passed away on June 14, 1926, at the Château de Beaufresne. She focused almost solely on modern women and their private lives, particularly those of mothers.

Mary Cassatt, an artist who came from a prestigious family in Pennsylvania, mostly worked in Europe. Her parents and sister relocated to Paris in 1877, and her two brothers and their families made regular visits. Despite her lack of marriage, she was no stranger to the family life she so often described. Cassatt, who is now recognized as an Impressionist, showed among the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and her good friend Degas. Like these painters, she was fiercely independent, and she never joined an art school or accepted any awards for her work during her lifetime. She's unique, however, in her focus on women's everyday lives, including child care, reading, crocheting, making tea, and socializing with other women.

Female Artists of the Elizabeth Chew School (brochure, Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)

Artist Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh. While Mary was young, her family traveled widely around Europe before settling in Philadelphia. Her brother Alexander rose to the position of president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and her father was a successful investment banker.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts accepted her at age fifteen, and after four years she relocated to Paris, where she temporarily studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme and mostly schooled herself by copying at the Louvre. She set up shop in Spain in 1872, after having previously been influenced by the likes of Courbet and Manet, where she studied the paintings of Velázquez and Ribera and painted a series of works featuring local individuals with highly modeled features set against dark backdrops.

When Edgar Degas viewed a Cassatt painting at the Salon in 1874, he exclaimed, "Voila! The way I feel is shared by at least one other person. Cassatt saw some pastels by Degas in a store display the same year and said, "It transformed my life!" The art I saw back then was the art I sought out. Not much time passed until they met, marking the beginning of a forty-year friendship and creative partnership.

In 1874, Degas introduced her to the other members of the fledgling impressionist brotherhood, and for the next nine years, she was the only American artist to regularly exhibit with and assist arrange exhibits for the group. It was the first time she discovered individuals whose "biting, critical, opinionated views mirrored her own," as her most recent biographer puts it.

Unlike Monet, Pissaro, and others of the Impressionist school, Cassatt and Degas chose the label "Independents" over "Impressionists" because they emphasized on the fidelity of form in their artwork while the Impressionists did the opposite. She used a similar high-key palette with just accents of clashing colors at first, like they did. Over time, however, Cassatt's approach changed, becoming less impressionistic as the figures grew more substantially colossal and put inside defined linear outlines.

Since cafés, clubs, bordellos, and even the streets of nineteenth-century Paris were not exactly open invitations to polite women, she was unable to paint as wide a range of subjects as her male counterparts. Her primary focus shifted to the home front, with brief excursions into the performing arts. Her paintings and sculptures often included mothers and their children, as well as other female family members. She avoided anecdotalism and sentimentality in her "Madonna" paintings by giving the subject matter a strong sense of structural authority and nuanced color appeal.

Since her vision began to deteriorate in her latter years, she increasingly focused on pastels, much like Degas did when faced with the same challenge. In the same vein as Degas, she rose to prominence as a master of that challenging medium.

While living in Paris in 1872, Cassatt became acquainted with Louisine Elder, an American young woman who would later marry American Gilded Age "sugar magnate" H. O. Havemeyer. Louisine, a lady of enormous money and exquisite taste, sought the advice of her artist friend as she began to build her collection of artwork. Over time, they were able to gather a sizable collection of impressionist art. A large portion of the collection was given to American museums, where it played a key role in popularizing what is now the most well recognized art movement in history.

Mary Cassatt is famous for portraying moms and children in natural, everyday settings. As far as we know, she was the first American artist to join forces with the French impressionists and show her work alongside theirs in Paris. At age eleven, Cassatt took her first trip to Europe with her family; by the time she was sixteen, she had already resolved to pursue painting professionally. Although her loved ones first protested, they soon gave in and let her enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Efficient and Cassatt (1991) However, she found the academy's regimented instruction to be tedious, and she ultimately returned to France, where she made her permanent home in the 1870s. Despite spending the most of her childhood in Paris, she never stopped thinking of herself as an American and was very proud of her Philadelphia upbringing. French artist Edgar Degas, a friend of hers, encouraged her to exhibit among the impressionists in 1877. She "accepted with enthusiasm" and found her first "begins to live" among this group of pals. Cassatt continued to paint throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and the 1890s are often considered to be her most productive artistic decade. However, by 1915, she had developed diabetes, and the subsequent vision loss rendered her unable to paint for the next eleven years of her life.

Most paintings Mary Cassatt did are about People, Portrait, Sketch and Study, Garden, and other subjects.

Most of the artist's works that can be seen by the public today are now kept in museums like National Gallery of Art - Washington DC, Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York, NY, Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and others.

Famous Mary Cassatt period artists include Pierre Auguste Renoir (French, 1841 -1919), John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 -1925), Claude Monet (French, 1840 -1926), Henri Lebasque (French, 1865 -1937), Edgar Degas (French, 1834 -1917), Frederick Childe Hassam (American, 1859 -1935), Alfred Sisley (French, 1839 -1899), Gustave Loiseau (French, 1865 -1935), William Merritt Chase (American, 1849 -1916), Paul Cézanne (French, 1839 -1906), Odilon Redon (French, 1840 -1916), Paul Gauguin (French, 1848 -1903), and others.

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