Mary Cassatt life and biography

Mary Stevenson Cassatt, born May 22, 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, United States – died June 14, 1926 in Paris, France was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists.

Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.

A Taste of Europe.
Born into a wealthy Pennsylvania family, Mary Stevenson Cassatt enlisted privilege in the service of artistic endeavor. She spent much of her adult life in France, where she was the only American artist who frequented the inner circles of the French Impressionists. The roots of Cassatt's success may be traced to a childhood rich in culture and creature comforts. Pittsburgh in the mid nineteenth century boasted no more solid citizens than the investment banker Robert Simpson Cassatt and his wife, Katherine Johnston Cassatt. Born on 22 May 1844, Mary Cassatt was one of five children; she had just turned seven when the family embarked on a four-year visit to Europe. On their return the Cassatts settled in Philadelphia--then the second-largest city in America. At age sixteen Mary enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art; six years later, having exhausted the academy's offerings, she ventured to Paris in the company of her friend and fellow art student Eliza Haldeman. As the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts was closed to women, Cassatt was forced to pursue her studies in private lessons and in the artist colonies sprinkled across the French countryside.

The Young Artist.
"Americans have a way of thinking work is nothing," Cassatt observed near the end of her career. "Come out and play they say." Blessed with money and leisure, Cassatt chose work over play. Having returned home in 1870, Cassatt moved with her family from Philadelphia to Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she struggled to maintain her artistic momentum away from the centers of cultural influence. New York galleries failed to sell her paintings, and a substantial collection of her early work, on display in a Chicago gallery, burned up in the Great Fire of 1871. That December twenty-seven-year-old Cassatt sailed again for Europe--and embarked on a period marked by both productivity and periodic self-doubt. In Italy, Spain, and France Cassatt acquired artistic technique by studying the old masters and mingling with the new. She developed a particular talent for painting women, both in portraits and the more informal "pictures" that she considered a higher form of art. In 1874 Ida, Cassatt's painting of a red-haired woman, so impressed Edgar Degas that he declared its unknown artist to be "someone who feels as I do." Although Ida had gained a spot in that year's Paris Salon--the "official" annual exhibition of fine art--Cassatt remained at odds with the art establishment, criticized for her "sloppy" brushwork and rambunctious use of color. Not until 1877, when Degas invited her to exhibit with the "Independents" (later known as the Impressionists), did Cassatt find a true home abroad.

Among the Impressionists.
Impressionism liberated Cassatt from artistic convention. In early paintings Cassatt had strained for "mood" by draping sitters in exotic costumes or placing subjects in romantic settings. Now, however, Cassatt began to uncover "atmosphere" in the commonplace and to achieve fresh effects with experimental brush- and colorwork rather than artificial composition. Cassatt's parents and sister joined her overseas in 1877; her brother and his children visited often. Increasingly, Cassatt employed her relatives as models. Works such as The Cup of Tea or Mrs. Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren, both exhibited at the 1881 Impressionist show, stand as representative glimpses into the Cassatt family circle. Cassatt's many mother-and-child compositions of the 1880s and 1890s--among them, Gardner Held by His Mother (1888), Mother's Goodnight Kiss (1888), At the Window (1889), Helene de Septeuil (1889), Baby on His Mother's Arm, Sucking His Finger (1889), Mother and Child (1890), and The Bath (1890-1891)--depict a full range of domestic activity. Settled in Paris, surrounded by friends and family, Cassatt could half-jokingly describe her own domestic routine as "housekeeping, painting & oyster frying." Whatever her merits as housekeeper or cook, by the 1890s Cassatt's artistic talents had earned her the regard of her adopted land. "Mary is at work again, intent on fame & money she says, & counts on her fellow country men now that she has made a reputation here," Cassatt's mother commented in 1891. The following year Cassatt finally received a summons from the American art establishment.

A Modern Woman.
In 1892 the organizers of the upcoming World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago commissioned Cassatt to paint a mural for the Woman's Building. Cassatt addressed her subject, Modern Woman, in three allegorical panels: "Young Girls Pursuing Fame," "Arts, Music, Dancing," and the centerpiece, "Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science." The mural was abstract, symbolic, and, Cassatt hoped, "as bright, as gay, as amusing as possible." When a friend protested that Cassatt had depicted "woman apart from her relations to man," Cassatt countered that men were to be "painted in all their vigour on the walls of the other buildings." In her corner of the Woman's Building, the artist hoped to capture "the sweetness of childhood, the charm of womanhood." As she declared, "if I have not conveyed some sense of that charm, in one word if I have not been absolutely feminine, then I have failed." Like so many of the other artistic fancies on display in Chicago, Cassatt's mural was dismantled at the close of the fair in 1893 and subsequently lost.

The Final Years.
To the end Cassatt continued to paint women at work, at home, and at play. An advocate of women's rights, she held women responsible for their own advancement. "American women have been spoiled, treated and indulged like children," she observed late in life; "they must wake up to their duties." By 1915 eye trouble forced Cassatt to give painting. She remained a fixture of American expatriate society for another decade, dying at her country home outside Paris on 14 June 1926.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Born: Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, 22 May 1844. Education: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1860-64; studied under Charles Chaplin and Jean-Leon Gerome in Paris, 1866; Edouard Frere and Paul Soyer at Courances and Ecouen, 1867-68; Thomas Courture at Villiers-le-Bel near Ecueon, 1869 and 1874; Charles Bellay in Rome, 1870. Died: 14 June 1926.

WORKS
* Individual Exhibitions

* 1891: Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris
* 1891: F. Keppel and Co., New York
* 1893: Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris
* 1895: Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York
* 1898: Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York
* 1903: Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York
* 1907: Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York
* 1908: Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris
* 1914: Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris
* 1927: Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York
* 1927: Philadelphia (memorial)
* 1927: Chicago (memorial)
* 1927: New York (memorial)
* 1927: Galerie A.-M. Reitlinger, Paris
* 1931: Galerie A.-M. Reitlinger, Paris
* 1985: Philadelphia Museum of Art (retrospective)
* 1989: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (traveling retrospective)

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