Mary Cassatt

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born on 22 May 1844 in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into a prosperous family; her father, Robert Simpson Cassatt, worked in finance. She spent several childhood years in Europe, then studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from about 1861 to 1865. In 1866 she went to Paris, copied old masters in the Louvre and worked in the circle of Charles Chaplin, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Thomas Couture. Her first Salon acceptance came in 1868. After studying Correggio in Parma and travelling in Spain and the Low Countries, she settled in Paris in 1874. Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists, and she showed with them in 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886. She bought the Château de Beaufresne in 1894, stopped painting around 1914 as her sight failed, and died there on 14 June 1926, at Le Mesnil-Théribus, near Paris.

Cassatt's early Salon pictures of Spanish and Parisian subjects gave way, under Degas's friendship and the example of the Impressionists, to a lighter palette and a steady attention to women and children in intimate settings. In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878, National Gallery of Art, Washington), Degas advised on the background, and the child sprawls in an unposed way across a vivid, tilted room. After a large exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris in 1890, she made a celebrated series of color prints in drypoint and aquatint, and her paintings took on flatter patterning and cropped, high viewpoints. The Child's Bath (1893, Art Institute of Chicago) shows this clearly: a mother and child seen from above, with striped dress, carpet and wallpaper built as pattern. She also painted The Boating Party (1893–94, National Gallery of Art, Washington), an outdoor scene begun at Antibes, with a large, daring crop.

Cassatt did more than paint. She advised American collectors, above all Louisine and Henry Havemeyer, and so helped bring Impressionist pictures into American museums; much of the Havemeyer collection is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her mural Modern Woman, made for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, is lost, but her paintings, pastels and prints remain in major museums on both sides of the Atlantic, and she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973. For a painter working in oils, her work is a lesson in clear, high-keyed color: pale flesh set against bold patterned fabrics, soft edges beside crisp contours, and daylight that models form without heavy shadow.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.