Mary Cassatt

Works by this Artist

Child’s Bath
Mary Cassatt, 1893

Background

bourgeois, daughter of a banker

Studies

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia); with Jean-Léon Gérôme and Charles Chaplin (Paris); with Paul Soyer (Ecouen); with Thomas Couture (Villiers-le-Bel); with Charles Bellay (Rome)

Career

1868 – exhibits at Paris Salon (also in 1870, 1872-76)

1874 – settles in Paris

1875 & 1877 – Salon entries are rejected

1879 – exhibits at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition (also Fifth in 1880, Sixth in 1881 and Eighth/last in 1886)

1889 & 1890 – exhibits at Société des Peintres-Graveurs (Society of Painters and Engravers)

1891 – first solo exhibition at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery (Paris)

1892 –commissioned to paint mural Modern Woman for the Woman’s Building at World’s Columbian Exposition (1893, Chicago)

1895 – retrospective exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s galleries in Paris and New York

1904 – awarded Légion d’honneur

Travels

Paris, Ecouen, Villiers-le-Bel, Rome (1866-70); USA (1870-71); Parma, Madrid, Seville, Antwerp, Rome (1871-74)

Important Artworks

The Loge, 1882 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

The Boating Party, 1893-94 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

Mother and Child (The Oval Mirror), c. 1899 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Dealer

Paul Durand-Ruel

Documentation:

In a letter to her friend and patron, Louisine Havemeyer, Cassatt recalled her first encounter with Degas’s art:

“How well I remember, nearly forty years ago, seeing for the first time Degas’s pastels in the window of a picture dealer on the Boulevard Haussmann. I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.”

Cited in Louisine W. Havemeyer, “Mary Cassatt,” Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum, vol. 23, no. 113 (May 1927): 377.

Web Resources

smarthistory: Cassatt, The Loge

Metmuseum: Cassatt

Readings:

Buettner, Stewart. “Images of Modern Motherhood in the Art of Morisot, Cassatt, Modersohn-Becker, Kollwitz,” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1986 – Winter 1987): 14-21

Cassatt, Mary. Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman. Exhibition catalogue. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1998

Iskin, Ruth E. “Selling, Seduction and Soliciting the Eye: Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère", in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 235-57.

Pollock, Griselda. Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998

Pollock, Griselda. Mary Cassatt. London: Chaucer, 2005

Images