Mary Cassatt

The life of Mary Cassatt,
scene by scene

1. 1860Philadelphia

   Mary was born in 1844 into a well-off Pennsylvania family and spent several years of her childhood in Europe with her parents. Around sixteen she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. But the classes felt slow to her. She made up her mind to go to Europe and learn from the old masters in person.

2. 1866Paris

   At twenty-two, Mary arrived in Paris. The national art school there did not admit women. So she studied privately with the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme and copied old paintings in the Louvre. In 1868 one of her pictures was hung at the official Paris Salon for the first time.

3. 1877Paris

   Edgar Degas came to see her and invited her to show with the Impressionists. She said yes, and from the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879 her paintings hung beside theirs. She was the only American invited to exhibit with this French group. That same year, 1877, her parents and her older sister Lydia moved to Paris to live with her, and Lydia often posed for her pictures.

4. 1890Paris

   In the spring of 1890, a large exhibition of Japanese prints opened at the national art school in Paris. Mary was captivated by their flat areas of color, bold outlines, and views from above. The next year she published a set of ten color prints of women's daily routines, putting what she had learned from Japanese prints to work.

5. 1893Paris

   Look at The Child's Bath. We see the two figures from above. A woman holds a small child on her lap and washes the child's foot in a basin of water. The woman's dress is striped in pale violet and green, and the rug and wallpaper are crowded with patterns too. In the lower right stands a white pitcher painted with pink flowers, and in the lower left corner you can find her signature. Both of them are looking down at the foot in the water. The painting was exhibited widely from 1893, and in 1910 it became the first Cassatt to enter the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year, 1893, a huge mural she painted, Modern Woman, hung in the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

   Painted around this timeThe Child's Bath
6. 1901Italy

   Mary traveled through Italy and Spain with her American friends Louisine and Henry Havemeyer, helping them choose paintings. For years she urged the couple to buy French painters such as Degas and Manet, as well as old masters. Much of what they gathered was later given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

7. 1914France

   Around the age of seventy, cataracts clouded Mary's eyes, and she could no longer paint. Operations did not bring her sight back. She had been made a knight of the French Legion of Honor in 1904, but she spent her last years nearly blind.

8. 1926Le Mesnil-Théribus

   In June 1926, Mary died at eighty-two at Château de Beaufresne, her country house north of Paris. She never married. After buying the house in 1894, she spent summers there and winters in Paris, working at her paintings and prints.