Mary Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker, born on May 22, 1844, in Allegheny City, a town that is now part of Pittsburgh. She made her career in France, where Edgar Degas invited her to show her work with the Impressionists.
Her best-known painting is The Child's Bath, of 1893. She died on June 14, 1926, at her country house in the Oise, north of Paris.
Cassatt painted women and children at home, at the theater and at their daily tasks, and she made color prints inspired by Japanese woodblocks. She never married. She also advised the American collectors who filled the museums of her own country.
Her father told her he would almost rather see her dead than see her become a painter. She went to Paris anyway.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Robert Cassatt's anger came from the world he belonged to. He was from a Pittsburgh banking family, and in that world a daughter learned to draw the way she learned French, as an accomplishment for a well-bred girl.
The family spent long stretches of Mary's childhood in France and Germany, so Europe was familiar ground. At 15 she began classes at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and she found the teaching slow.
When she made clear that she meant to make a career of painting, her father drew a line. He would keep paying for her food and lodging, but not for her art supplies.
She meant to train in Paris, and there a door was closed to her. The École des Beaux-Arts, the state school where French painters were trained, did not admit women.
Learning in Paris without the school
Mary Cassatt arrived in Paris in 1866, with her mother as chaperone. Shut out of the École, she found two ways to learn that needed no place there.
What You'll Discover
How she got round a closed school.
What Degas painted into her picture.
What a Japanese exhibition set off.
What happened to her biggest painting.
Why Degas stopped speaking to her.
What her own family did to her show.