Mary Cassatt

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Born: 1844

Died: 1926

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Summary of Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt was born in the United States and studied painting in France for the most of her life and career. She was recognised for her brilliance by contemporaries such as Edgar Degas, and she became the only American artist to show with the Impressionists in Paris. Portraits of ladies and depictions of moms and children in daily situations were her hallmark topics. She was a strikingly contemporary late-nineteenth-century artist in both her style and her perceptive evocations of women’s inner lives.

Cassatt’s work merged Impressionism’s light colour palette and free brushwork with Japanese art and European Old Masters compositions, and she worked in a number of media throughout her career. At a time when few women were considered serious artists, her flexibility helped her achieve professional success. Cassatt’s paintings frequently represented home situations, rather than the more public locations that her male colleagues were permitted to visit. Her work was sometimes regarded as stereotypically “feminine,” but most critics recognised that she possessed great technical talent and psychological understanding. Cassatt became a significant character in the turn-of-the-century art world and helped to create the desire for Impressionist painting in her home United States thanks to her commercial acumen and friendships and professional ties with artists, dealers, and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Childhood

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born into a well-to-do upper-middle-class family: her father was a prominent stockbroker, and her mother came from a well-to-do banking family. From 1851 until 1855, the Cassatts resided in France and Germany, exposing Mary to European arts and culture at an early age. She also studied French and German as a kid, which would come in handy later in her work overseas. Her upbringing is unknown, although she may have attended the 1855 Paris World’s Fair, when she would have seen works by Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, among others. Cassatt began two years of studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1860, when he was 16 years old. In 1865, she petitioned her parents to let her to pursue her artistic education outside of the United States. Despite their reservations, they consented, and she relocated to Paris to study under Jean-Léon Gérôme. She returned to Paris after a brief stay in the United States from 1870 to 1871, during which she was disappointed by a lack of creative resources and possibilities. She also travelled to Spain, Italy, and Holland in the early 1870s, where she became acquainted with the work of artists such as Diego Velázquez, Peter Paul Rubens, and Antonio da Correggio.

Early Life

Cassatt had established herself in a Paris studio by 1874. Her parents and sister Lydia joined her in France three years later. Her family was regularly used as models in her late 1870s and 1880s work, which included numerous photos of modern women at the theatre and opera, as well as in gardens and parlours. Cassatt, who had always been stubborn and self-reliant, now had the chance to focus on her art in a place where, as she later put it, “women [did] not have to fight for recognition if they did serious work.” Cassatt had a painting accepted and commended in the Salon of 1872, and she continued to display her art at Salons in the following years. However, she became dissatisfied with the politics and conventional preferences of Paris’s official art world when one of her submissions was rejected by the Salon in 1875 and neither of her entries was approved in 1877. She was ecstatic when artist Edgar Degas asked her to join the Impressionists, a group of self-taught artists, in 1877. She had long admired Degas’s work and quickly became good friends with him; the two regularly collaborated, supporting and coaching one another.

Mid Life

From 1879 through 1886, Cassatt exhibited with the Impressionists in Paris, and in 1886, she was part of the first major exhibition of Impressionist painting in the United States, presented at the Durand-Ruel galleries in New York. She continued to create images of women in home interiors, with an Impressionist emphasis on hastily caught moments of current life, and she switched from oil painting to pastels and printing. Since the 1878 Exposition Universelle, Japanese art had been highly popular in Paris, and Cassatt (like many Impressionists) integrated its aesthetic techniques into her own work.

Cassatt’s sympathetic portrayals of mothers and children had made her famous by the 1880s. These paintings, like many of her depictions of women, may have been successful for a specific reason: they met a cultural demand to idealise women’s household duties at a time when many women were becoming interested in voting rights, clothing reform, higher education, and social equality. Cassatt’s representations of her fellow upper-middle-class and upper-class ladies, however, were never simple; hidden behind the light brushwork and bright hues of her Impressionist style were layers of significance. Cassatt never married or had children, preferring to devote her entire life to her work. Bertha Honore Palmer, a businesswoman and philanthropist who requested Cassatt to create a mural for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and believed that “women should be someone and not something.” shared and appreciated Cassatt’s progressive approach.

Late Life

Cassatt’s health deteriorated and her eyesight deteriorated after 1900. She did, however, retain strong ties with other artists and prominent individuals in the French art scene, ranging from Pierre-Auguste Renoir to American collectors Harry and Lousine Havemeyer. During the terrible Dreyfus controversy of the late 1890s, she and Degas had a breach in their friendship (Cassatt, like Pissarro and Monet, was pro-Dreyfus, while Degas was anti-Dreyfus), but they subsequently reconciled. Cassatt was given the order of Chevalier of la Legion d’honneur by the French government in 1904 for her services to culture. Her last trip to the United States was in 1908. Lydia, her adored sister, died in 1882 after a lengthy illness, and her brother Alexander, the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, died in 1906.

Cassatt was unable to work by 1914 owing to her worsening blindness, although she continued to display her work. During World War I, she spent much of her time at Grasse before returning to her country house, a castle near Le Mesnil-Theribus, fifty miles northwest of Paris. On June 14, 1926, Cassatt passed away.

Cassatt remained busy into the 1910s, seeing the rise of modernism in Europe and the United States in her latter years; yet, her unique style remained consistent. Her impact on subsequent painters was limited because to the decreasing critical interest for Impressionism following her death in the 1920s. One exception was the “Beaver Hall Group.” a group of female painters headquartered in Montreal, Canada, during the 1920s.

Famous Art by Mary Cassatt

Little Girl in Blue Armchair

1878

Cassatt opted to depict a little girl alone in a home environment in this significant piece from her mature career. The asymmetrical composition, raised viewpoint, shallow space, and abrupt cropping of the scene all indicate the influence of Japanese art. The visible brushwork and the figure’s informal pose are hallmarks of Impressionism; the asymmetrical composition, raised viewpoint, shallow space, and abrupt cropping of the scene all indicate the influence of Japanese art. Cassatt also contributes her own keen insights to the image’s creation. The girl, who was Degas’s friend’s kid, is seated in a sprawling, unselfconscious manner that reminds the spectator of her youth, and the way she is dwarfed by the adult furniture surrounding her suggests the discomfort and loneliness of childhood.

A Woman and a Girl Driving

1881

Lydia, Cassatt’s sister, and Degas’s little niece served as models for this work. The scene is situated in the Bois de Boulogne, a vast, lush park that served as a popular gathering spot and picturesque destination for pleasure rides. Cassatt cropped the horse on the left side of the composition and the carriage on the right side and bottom. This contrast between childhood and age, experience and learning, is one of Cassatt’s numerous psychological observations. The tiny girl, clothed in pastel pink, sits peacefully alongside the mother who handles the reins. The representation of a well-bred woman undertaking a physically demanding task was also rare for the period.

Mother and Child

1905

Cassatt was almost entirely dealing on the topic of mothers and children at the turn of the century, employing professional models for her figures. She examines another connection between ladies at various phases of life in this artwork. The mother’s stylish clothing contrasts with the child’s pure nudity, and their movements and gazes bind the two figures together. Cassatt created a complicated spatial and conceptual arrangement of pictures inside images by incorporating two mirrors in the composition. Women staring in mirrors, viewing themselves as objects of beauty, had been represented by artists ranging from Diego Velázquez and Peter Paul Rubens through Édouard Manet.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

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Mary Cassatt was born in the United States and studied painting in France for the most of her life and career.
She was recognised for her brilliance by contemporaries such as Edgar Degas, and she became the only American artist to show with the Impressionists in Paris.
Portraits of ladies and depictions of moms and children in daily situations were her hallmark topics.

She was a strikingly contemporary late-nineteenth-century artist in both her style and her perceptive evocations of women’s inner lives.
Cassatt’s work merged Impressionism’s light colour palette and free brushwork with Japanese art and European Old Masters compositions, and she worked in a number of media throughout her career.
At a time when few women were considered serious artists, her flexibility helped her achieve professional success.

Cassatt’s paintings frequently represented home situations, rather than the more public locations that her male colleagues were permitted to visit.
Her work was sometimes regarded as stereotypically “feminine,” but most critics recognised that she possessed great technical talent and psychological understanding.
Cassatt became a significant character in the turn-of-the-century art world and helped to create the desire for Impressionist painting in her home United States thanks to her commercial acumen and friendships and professional ties with artists, dealers, and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic.