Mary Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker known for her depictions of women and children. Based in France for the last fifty-two years of her life, she was the only American to exhibit with the original French Impressionist group, participating in four of its eight exhibitions. Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit with the group in 1877 after the Salon jury rejected her submissions.
Mary Cassatt was an American painter who spent her working life in France and exhibited with the Impressionists in 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886 — four of the eight exhibitions the group held. She was the only American among them.
Edgar Degas brought her in. In 1877 the Salon jury rejected both of her submissions, and Degas, who had admired her work for three years, asked her to show with the independents instead. She described what that meant in a single sentence: "I accepted with joy. At last I could work with absolute independence, without considering the opinion of a jury."
Cassatt was born on 22 May 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh. Her father was a banker and land speculator, her brother Alexander became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the family spent several years of her childhood in Paris, Heidelberg and Darmstadt. She enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1860, at fifteen, and studied there until 1865.[1]
She moved to Paris in 1866 to keep training. The École des Beaux-Arts did not admit women, so she did what women in her position did instead: took private instruction, in her case from the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, and copied old masters in the galleries of the Louvre. The copying mattered later. Degas drew her doing it.[2]
In 1874 Cassatt stopped in front of a Paris dealer's window holding pastels by Edgar Degas. She went back repeatedly. "I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art," she wrote. "It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it." She settled in France that same year and never again lived in the United States.[3]
Degas had seen her work at the Salon and asked who she was. They met soon after, and the friendship ran for forty years — close, argumentative, and never romantic so far as any surviving document shows. In 1877 the Salon rejected both pictures she submitted. Degas asked her to exhibit with the independents instead, and she stopped submitting to the Salon altogether.[4]
Neither of them liked the name Impressionist, which the critic Louis Leroy had coined as an insult in 1874. Both preferred to be called independents, and both cared more about drawing and structure than about dissolving a scene into light.
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, painted in 1878, shows a small child flung sideways across an enormous blue armchair, bored, with a Brussels griffon puppy asleep beside her. Degas had given Cassatt the puppy. He also worked on the canvas. Writing in 1903, twenty-five years later, Cassatt said that he "found it good and advised me on the background and he even worked on it" — and conservation analysis at the National Gallery of Art has since identified passages that appear to be his, including the odd wedge of floor between the chairs.[5]
She submitted it to the American section of the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris and it was rejected. Her annoyance survives in the same letter, and it is aimed squarely at the jury: it "consisted of three people of which one was a pharmacist!" The painting hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington today.[5]
Cassatt showed with the group for the first time at the fourth exhibition, in April 1879, and again in 1880, 1881 and 1886. Her subjects were women and children, indoors: a woman reading the morning paper, a mother washing a child's foot, two young women in a theatre box watching the stage while the audience watches them.[1]
Her elder sister Lydia modelled for a great many of these pictures. Lydia had been ill for years with Bright's disease, a kidney condition, and died in Paris on 7 November 1882 at forty-five. Cassatt was unable to paint or make prints for months afterwards.
In 1890 a large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints came to Paris, and Cassatt went repeatedly. What she took from it is visible in everything she made afterwards: the high viewpoint, the flat blocks of pattern, the cropped and off-centre composition. She spent the following year making a set of ten colour prints in drypoint and aquatint, and Galerie Durand-Ruel showed them in 1891 in her first solo exhibition.[6]
In 1873 Cassatt, then twenty-nine, persuaded a seventeen-year-old American named Louisine Elder to buy a Degas pastel. It is among the first Impressionist works bought by an American. Elder married the sugar refiner Henry Havemeyer in 1883, and for the next forty years Cassatt told the couple what to buy.[7]
The Havemeyer collection went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is the reason New York holds the Impressionist paintings it does. Louisine Havemeyer called Cassatt the fairy godmother of the collection and said the best things in it had been bought on her advice.[8]
France gave her the Légion d'honneur in 1904. In 1893 she painted a mural on the theme of modern woman, twelve feet by fifty-eight, for the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; the building was demolished afterwards and the mural has never been found. In 1915 she sent eighteen works to a New York exhibition held in support of votes for women, which caused a rift with her niece and with Alexander's side of the family, who opposed suffrage.[9]
From 1887 Cassatt wintered in an apartment on the rue de Marignan, off the Champs-Élysées. In March 1894 she bought the Château de Beaufresne at Le Mesnil-Théribus, about fifty miles north-west of Paris in the Oise, and spent the rest of her life between the two.[10]
In 1911 she was diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia and cataracts. The cataracts ended the work. Operations failed to restore her sight, and she stopped painting in 1914, twelve years before she died. She was blind at the end.[11]
Mary Cassatt died at Beaufresne on 14 June 1926, aged eighty-two, and is buried in the family vault at Le Mesnil-Théribus. She had lived in France for fifty-two years.[10]
Born on 22 May in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh.
Spends part of her childhood in France and Germany, living with her family in Paris, Heidelberg and Darmstadt before returning to the United States.
Studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia while still in her teens, before seeking further training in Europe.
Moves to Paris to continue her training. With women excluded from the École des Beaux-Arts, she takes private lessons from Jean-Léon Gérôme and studies paintings in the Louvre.
Exhibits at the Paris Salon for the first time when The Mandolin Player is accepted. This recognition precedes her association with the Impressionists.
Returns to Pennsylvania during the Franco-Prussian War. A commission to copy paintings by Correggio in Parma helps her resume her European career in 1871.
Continues her study of older European painting in Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, examining works by Correggio, Velázquez, Rubens and Frans Hals.
Settles permanently in Paris, establishing France as the base for the rest of her life. Her later travels do not amount to a permanent return to the United States.
Studies Degas's pastels in a Paris dealer's window. Recalling their impact, she says: "It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it."
Encourages Louisine Elder, later Louisine Havemeyer, to buy Degas's Rehearsal of the Ballet. The acquisition begins a lasting relationship in which Cassatt advises her on collecting. Its precise date is debated, although Elder owned the work by early 1878.
Accepts Edgar Degas's invitation to exhibit with the independents after rejection by the Salon. Her parents and sister Lydia also join her in Paris that year.
Paints Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, with Degas advising on the composition and working on the canvas. The American selection jury for the Exposition Universelle in Paris rejects the painting.
Makes her debut with the group at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in Paris. It is the first of four exhibitions in which she will participate.
Experiments with Degas and Camille Pissarro on prints for Le Jour et la Nuit, a proposed journal intended to appear in 1880. The publication is never realized, but the collaboration deepens her experience of etching, drypoint and aquatint.
Exhibits in the fifth Impressionist exhibition, showing paintings and prints, including work developed during the Le Jour et la Nuit experiments.
Participates in the sixth Impressionist exhibition, her third appearance with the group.
Her sister and frequent model Lydia dies in Paris on 7 November, aged forty-five, after suffering from Bright's disease. The loss ends one of Cassatt's most sustained relationships with a sitter.
Shows in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition. Her appearances in 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886 make her the only American to participate in the original group's exhibitions.
Moves to an apartment and studio on the rue de Marignan in Paris and acquires a printing press for her studio.
Visits the exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Their colors, flattened forms and strong outlines encourage a new phase in her printmaking.
Shows her series of ten color prints at Durand-Ruel in Paris. Using drypoint, aquatint and other intaglio processes, she adapts the visual possibilities of Japanese prints rather than reproducing their woodblock technique.
Creates Modern Woman for the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Its scenes of women acquiring and passing on knowledge give her a rare opportunity to work on a monumental scale. The mural is subsequently lost.
Paints The Child's Bath, showing a woman washing a child's feet. Its view from above and patterned surfaces bring her study of Japanese prints into a closely observed scene of everyday care.
Paints The Boating Party, arranging a boatman, a woman and a child around the strong shapes of the boat and sail. The canvas will appear in her 1895 New York exhibition.
Purchases Château de Beaufresne at Le Mesnil-Théribus in the Oise. It becomes her country home, complementing her Paris residence.
Has her first solo exhibition in the United States at Durand-Ruel's New York gallery. The Boating Party is among the works shown.
Accompanies Henry and Louisine Havemeyer on a collecting trip to Italy and Spain, extending her role as an adviser on European art.
Is appointed a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in recognition of her artistic career.
Deteriorating eyesight increasingly limits her work. Her final paintings and pastels belong to a period marked by cataracts and diabetes.
Achille Segard's book about Cassatt is published in Paris, presenting an extended account of her art during the final years of her painting career.
Stops painting as her sight deteriorates. Her subsequent years are spent without a return to sustained artistic production, and she eventually becomes blind.
Contributes to the New York exhibition organized by Louisine Havemeyer at the Knoedler Gallery to support women's suffrage. Its catalogue lists eighteen works by Cassatt, although later archival research identifies additional works in the show. Her support for suffrage creates a rift with relatives who oppose the cause.
Edgar Degas dies, ending the friendship and artistic exchange that began with his invitation forty years earlier.
Dies at Beaufresne on 14 June, aged eighty-two, and is buried in the family vault at Le Mesnil-Théribus. France has been her permanent base for fifty-two years.
Louisine Havemeyer's bequest brings a substantial part of the collection she built with Cassatt's advice into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other works remain with the family or enter different institutions.
Drawing
Mary Cassatt painted herself about 1880, in gouache and watercolor over pencil, hiding her sketching surface from view and looking directly out at whoever is looking at her. It is one of only two self-portraits she is known to have painted, and it belongs to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
Painting
A woman in black leans forward in a theater box and looks through her opera glasses at the seats across from her. In the distance behind her, a man leans over the edge of his own box and trains his glasses on her. Mary Cassatt painted it in 1878, and it was the first of her Impressionist pictures shown in the United States.
Painting
A small girl lies flung sideways across a big blue floral armchair, one leg out, looking thoroughly unimpressed; her dog sleeps on the chair opposite. Mary Cassatt painted it in 1878, Edgar Degas advised her on it and painted part of the background himself, and an American jury rejected it that same year. It is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Painting
A woman in a printed cotton dress holds a sleepy toddler on her lap, the room behind them left in a few quick strokes. Mary Cassatt painted it about 1890, in the years when mothers and children were becoming the subject she is known for, and it hangs at the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas as part of the Roland P. Murdock Collection.
Painting
A boatman in dark blue sits at the oars with his back to the viewer, filling the left of the canvas, while a woman holding a baby faces him under a curving yellow sail. Mary Cassatt painted it on the Mediterranean coast at Antibes in the winter of 1893–94, and at roughly three feet by four it is one of the largest pictures she made. It has been at the National Gallery of Art in Washington since 1963.
Painting
A woman washes a child's feet in a basin, and the viewer looks down on both of them from almost directly above. Mary Cassatt painted it in 1893, after three years spent working out what Japanese woodblock prints could teach Western painting. It has been at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1910, and the museum calls it one of her masterworks.
Painting
Two small girls in blue dresses and sun hats dig in the sand with their pails, absorbed enough not to look up. Mary Cassatt painted it in 1884 and showed it two years later at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris. Beach scenes were common among her colleagues and rare in her own work, which the National Gallery of Art says makes this canvas unusual among her paintings.
Painting
A woman lies flat on her pillow with both arms around a small child who is sitting bolt upright on top of the bedclothes, wide awake and looking off out of the picture. A cup and saucer wait on the nightstand. Mary Cassatt painted it in 1897, and it is at The Huntington in San Marino, California.
Painting
A woman and a girl lean over the side of a small boat to watch two ducks on the water. There is no horizon and no shore — the pond fills the whole canvas, tipped up toward the viewer, and the boat is cut off at the right edge. Mary Cassatt painted it in 1894 on the pond of the country house she had bought that March, and it is at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago.
Painting
Two women sit side by side in a Paris drawing room. One rests her chin on her hand; the other lifts a teacup so high it hides her face. In front of them, on a round tray, a silver tea service takes up more of the canvas than either woman does. Mary Cassatt showed the painting at the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, and it has been at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston since 1942.
Painting
A woman bends over her needlework by a sunlit window. A small girl in white slumps against her knee, chin in hand, and looks straight out at whoever is looking in. Mary Cassatt painted it in 1900 and hired two models who were not related to each other to pose as mother and child. Louisine Havemeyer bought it the following year, and it has been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1929.
Painting
A woman holds the reins and a whip and looks straight ahead down the road. A small girl sits beside her, looking elsewhere. Behind them both, turned away, sits a groom whose face is barely visible. Mary Cassatt painted her sister Lydia driving in the Bois de Boulogne in 1881, and the painting has been at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1921.
Drawing
Mary Cassatt painted herself about 1880, in gouache and watercolor over pencil, hiding her sketching surface from view and looking directly out at whoever is looking at her. It is one of only two self-portraits she is known to have painted, and it belongs to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
A woman stands half-undressed over a wash basin, seen from behind, her striped gown fallen to her hips and a mirror catching part of her face. Mary Cassatt made it in 1890–91 as one of a suite of ten color prints, working at the press with the printer Leroy, after an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris changed what she thought printmaking could do.
A woman sits at a small writing desk in a blue patterned dress, holding a sealed envelope up to her mouth. Behind her the wallpaper carries a second pattern, and the two press flat against each other with almost no room between them. Mary Cassatt made it in 1890–91 as one of a suite of ten color prints, working the plates and the inking with a printer named Leroy.
Collaborated with
Degas invited her into the independents, and the NGA records her account that he worked directly on Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, adding the corner detail of the room.
Sat for a portrait by · 1879
Degas drew Cassatt in the galleries of the Louvre around 1879-80, standing and leaning on a furled umbrella while her sister Lydia sits reading the catalogue. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston holds an impression of the print, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery.
Painted a portrait of · 1878–1881
Lydia sat for her sister repeatedly between the late 1870s and 1881. Museums name her as the sitter in Automne at the Petit Palais, which Mary Cassatt gave to the museum herself in 1922, in Lydia at a Tapestry Frame at the Flint Institute of Arts, in Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the print Lydia and Her Mother at Tea at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Art movement · 1874–1886
Invited by Degas in 1877, she showed from the fourth exhibition of 1879 and appeared in four of the eight. The NGA quotes her verdict: 'At last I could work with absolute independence without considering the opinion of a jury.'
An American painter and printmaker who lived in France from 1874 until her death in 1926 and was the only American to exhibit with the French Impressionists. She showed in four of the group's eight exhibitions — 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886 — and painted women and children in domestic interiors, theatre boxes and gardens.
Edgar Degas invited her in 1877, the year the Salon jury rejected both of the paintings she submitted. He had admired her work since seeing it at the Salon three years earlier. She accepted and never submitted to the Salon again, writing later: "I accepted with joy. At last I could work with absolute independence, without considering the opinion of a jury."
No surviving document shows a romantic relationship. They were close friends and colleagues for about forty years, quarrelled often, and destroyed much of their correspondence. Degas advised on her paintings — he worked on the canvas of Little Girl in a Blue Armchair himself — and drew her repeatedly, including the print Mary Cassatt at the Louvre.
The Child's Bath (1893), in the Art Institute of Chicago, showing a woman washing a child's foot in a flowered basin, seen from above. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) and The Boating Party (1893–94), both at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, are the other two most reproduced.
Cassatt is a large part of the reason. In 1873 she persuaded Louisine Elder, then seventeen, to buy a Degas pastel, and after Elder married the sugar refiner Henry Havemeyer she advised the couple's collecting for forty years. Their collection went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Louisine Havemeyer said the best things she bought had been bought on Cassatt's advice.
Cataracts. She was diagnosed in 1911 with diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia and cataracts, and the operations that followed did not restore her sight. She stopped painting in 1914 and was blind for the last years of her life. She died at her house in the Oise on 14 June 1926.
In Paris from 1866, and from 1887 in an apartment on the rue de Marignan near the Champs-Élysées. In March 1894 she bought the Château de Beaufresne at Le Mesnil-Théribus, about fifty miles north-west of Paris, and divided her time between the two until her death there in 1926.
Associated with · 1879
Invited by Degas in 1877, she showed from the fourth exhibition of 1879 and appeared in four of the eight. The NGA quotes her verdict: 'At last I could work with absolute independence without considering the opinion of a jury.'
Collaborated with
Degas invited her into the independents, and the NGA records her account that he worked directly on Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, adding the corner detail of the room.
Studied at · 1866
Barred from the École des Beaux-Arts as a woman, Cassatt trained by copying old masters in the Louvre's galleries after arriving in Paris in 1866. Degas later drew her doing exactly that, in the print Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery.
Painted a portrait of · 1878–1881
Lydia sat for her sister repeatedly between the late 1870s and 1881. Museums name her as the sitter in Automne at the Petit Palais, which Mary Cassatt gave to the museum herself in 1922, in Lydia at a Tapestry Frame at the Flint Institute of Arts, in Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the print Lydia and Her Mother at Tea at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Sat for a portrait by · 1879
Degas drew Cassatt in the galleries of the Louvre around 1879-80, standing and leaning on a furled umbrella while her sister Lydia sits reading the catalogue. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston holds an impression of the print, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery.
Depicted in · 1880
Cassatt painted herself about 1880 in gouache and watercolor over graphite. The National Portrait Gallery, which holds the sheet as NPG.76.33, records Mary Cassatt as both the artist and the sitter.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Mary Cassatt and their work.
The Metropolitan on what training and exhibiting were open to women artists in nineteenth-century France.
The National Gallery's exhibition on the working relationship with Degas.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mary Cassatt page.
The National Gallery on her printmaking and what she took from the Japanese prints shown in Paris in 1890.
The Shelburne Museum on how Cassatt advised Louisine Havemeyer's buying.
The Metropolitan's account of the Havemeyer collection Cassatt helped assemble and which came to the museum.
The Art Institute on the Modern Woman mural painted for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
The Amis de Mary Cassatt's dated chronology of the life.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mary Cassatt page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mary Cassatt page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mary Cassatt page.
The Nelson-Atkins scholarly catalogue entry for the Degas pastel.
Colby College Museum of Art on the prints.
The Metropolitan's record of the first state of The Letter.
The Metropolitan's record of In the Opera Box.
The Metropolitan's record of Nurse Reading to a Little Girl.
The Metropolitan on the mother-and-child pictures read as modernist rather than sentimental.
The Pennsylvania Academy's record of Bacchante.
The Pennsylvania Academy's record of Young Thomas and His Mother.
Peer-reviewed article placing La Femme au tournesol in the context of the women's suffrage argument.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts on her career.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum on her career.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's summary of the life and work.
The Honolulu Museum of Art's summary of the life and work.
Achille Segard's 1913 monograph, the first book written about her, digitised by the Smithsonian Libraries.
Reference biography cross-checked for the chronology.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Mary Cassatt. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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