Mary Stevenson Cassatt

Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), Mary Cassatt belonged to a wealthy family that spent a great deal of time abroad. As a young girl she lived for a time in France, traveled in Europe, and then settled in Philadelphia. From 1861 to 1865 she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Thomas Eakins was a fellow student. For the next ten years or so, Cassatt moved restlessly around Europe, visiting museums and studying with popular teachers. In Paris and its environs, from 1866 to 1870, she studied in the private ateliers of academic artists, among them Jean-Léon Gérôme, because women were not allowed to enroll in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After 1872 she studied in Italy, Spain, Holland, and Belgium before settling permanently in Paris in 1875.

Cassatt experienced early success with the Salon and exhibited there almost every year from 1868 to 1876. Her early works were inspired by the paintings she had seen in European museums; she was especially fond of Frans Hals and Rubens. Her canvases depict monumental figures in the traditional academic style, using rich dark colors and chiaroscuro, and incorporate an honest direct rendering of contemporary subject matter that she admired in her contemporaries Edouard Manet and Gustave Courbet. By the mid-1870s, however, Cassatt's palette began to lighten under the influence of Edgar Degas's work.

In 1877, after she began to experience difficulties in getting her canvases accepted at the Salon, Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists, whom she joined from 1879 to 1886. During this time Cassatt developed the themes that would characterize her work for the duration of her career. Like Berthe Morisot, Cassatt embraced the subject of the private domestic scenes of well-bred women. Her parents and her sister, Lydia, who had moved to Paris in 1877, were frequent subjects, and they often appear occupied in various domestic activities, such as reading, drinking tea, or playing with children. Following another theme popular with others in the Impressionist group, Cassatt painted a number of pictures of young women at the theater and the opera. Her most famous works, perhaps, are her depictions of mothers and children, which she began painting in 1880. In 1890 and 1891 Cassatt designed and produced a series of color woodcuts in imitation of Japanese woodblock prints; she became a master of this medium and is considered one of the leading printmakers of the nineteenth century.

In 1892 Cassatt was commissioned to produce a mural of "Modern Woman" for the Women's Building in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Consistent with her beliefs in women's rights to education and other opportunities, the mural depicts women of all ages plucking fruit from the tree of knowledge. Cassatt was given several solo shows in the 1890s at Durand-Ruel's galleries in Paris and New York. In 1908 she visited the United States for the last time. Cataracts caused her eyesight to fail about 1913; by the early 1920s she was virtually blind.

At her death, Cassatt was considered by many to be America's leading female artist. She was instrumental in introducing Impressionist painting to American collectors. Her primary patron was her longtime friend Louisine Havemeyer. She and her husband, Harry, a New York sugar magnate, Havemeyer collected works by Cassatt, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Courbet, and Manet and introduced French painting to their friends.

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born in America and lived and worked in France after 1875. Raised a member of a prominent upper-middle-class family in western Pennsylvania, she traveled extensively in Europe with her family as a child. She studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1860 to 1862. Cassatt left America for Europe in 1865, studying art in Paris, Rome, and Madrid for four years. Unable to enter the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris because of her gender, she studied privately with several European artists, among them Jean-Léon Gérôme and Thomas Couture. After returning briefly to the United States, she went back to Europe in the early 1870s, traveling and studying the Old Masters in Spain, Belgium, and Italy. In 1874 she was living in Paris, and by 1877 her work had attracted the attention of the Impressionist Edgar Degas, who invited her to exhibit with the group. She was the only American artist to join them. Subsequently, her palette lightened and her work became notable for its strong draftsmanship.

Known primarily for her oil paintings, Cassatt also worked in watercolor, pastel, and print. During the 1870s and 1880s she developed the themes for which she is known today: women engaged in private domestic activities such as reading, crocheting, and having tea, attending the theater, and her "trademark" subject, a mother and child.

By the 1890s Cassatt's work had gained widespread interest in the United States. She had her first solo show in America at this time and created the mural "Modern Woman" (now destroyed) for the Woman's Building at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Called the "most eminent of all living American women painters" in 1909,(1) Cassatt, who never married, was a consistent supporter of women's rights, as indicated by her participation in the 1915 "Loan Exhibition of Masterpieces by Old and Modern Painters for the Benefit of Woman Suffrage" in New York. Her eyesight failing in her last years, she played a critical role advising prominent Americans who were creating collections of contemporary art. She died at her country home in France.

S.A.

NOTES:

1. "Most Eminent of All Living American Women Painters," "Current Literature" 46 (February 1909): 167-70.