100 Years Later, Mary Cassatt Deserves Her Moment

Who Was Mary Cassatt?

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, into a wealthy family. Her stockbroker father soon moved the family eastward to Philadelphia, where Cassatt started her schooling at age six.

She traveled extensively with her family during her childhood, learning German and French while receiving lessons in drawing and music abroad. Coming from a conservative family and attempting to enter the male-dominated European art world, Cassatt faced many obstacles in her path to greatness.

Her education in France spurred her passion for art, but her family disapproved of her pursuing an artistic career. Despite this, she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia at only 15 years old, continuing to study even during the Civil War.

Although there were other women at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, most of them did not intend to pursue art professionally and instead viewed the experience as a means for social success and recognition. Cassatt, however, believed art was a serious practice and was determined to pursue it as a career.

European Education and Recognition

Feeling that the curriculum in Pennsylvania was insufficient and frustrated by the patronizing attitudes of male students and instructors, Mary Cassatt withdrew from the Academy and relocated to Paris in 1866, accompanied by her mother as chaperone, despite continued objections from her father.

There, she privately studied the Old Masters, as women were not yet allowed to attend the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Two years after settling in Paris, Cassatt achieved an early milestone when her painting The Mandolin Player was accepted into the Paris Salon, marking the beginning of her recognition within the traditional European academic art world.

At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Cassatt was forced to return home and briefly stopped painting due to her father’s discouragement. However, in 1872, Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Domenec commissioned her to paint two copies of Correggio paintings in Parma, Italy, and paid for her return to Europe.

The Impressionists: Degas and Morisot

Cassatt settled permanently in Paris in 1874 and continued to exhibit at the Salon between 1872 and 1876. It was at these Salons that Edgar Degas saw her work.

Cassatt already admired Degas’ work, and the two became friends in 1877. Degas’ influence led Cassatt to experiment with new compositions, mediums and subject matter, sharing Degas’ interest in depicting everyday life. Cassatt had previously spoken out against the rigid ideals of the Salon’s jurors and eagerly took the opportunity to join the Impressionist exhibition at Degas’ invitation, becoming the only American to participate across four exhibitions between 1879 and 1886.

Cassatt also formed a close friendship with Berthe Morisot. The two Impressionists differed greatly in approach but shared artistic interests and intentions. Both women created paintings that broke away from the tradition of relegating women to the role of object, or muse, and instead raised them to the status of subjects.

Morisot frequently portrayed women in intimate domestic environments, rendered with expressive brushwork and a light, airy palette. Cassatt’s canvases were more highly structured and saturated in comparison. Together, the women added a depth of perspective to the Impressionist movement that is often overlooked even today.

What Made Cassatt Revolutionary?

The French art world was not designed to accommodate an American woman like Cassatt. That she not only persisted but thrived speaks to her intellectual advancement and technical skill.

Cassatt’s subject matter subverted expectations of what can and should be celebrated in fine art. She focused on women and was particularly interested in reinterpreting the mother-and-child motif. For decades, critics read these subjects as soft and feminine, and therefore minor and unimportant.

In truth, her technique was the opposite—assertive, experimental and ahead of its time. By developing a command of pastel that rivaled Degas’ and incorporating Japanese woodblock influences, Cassatt’s bold, asymmetrical compositions revolutionized painting. In her hands, the domestic “feminine” sphere became a radical means of examining modernity.

Key Works

Close examination of a few of Cassatt’s key artworks reveals the details of her revolutionary practice.

Little Girl in the Blue Armchair, painted in 1878, is sometimes considered her first Impressionist painting. The fragmented composition, bold colors and the little girl’s slouching position in the chair, despite her prim outfit, subvert expectations of traditional portraiture. When Cassatt submitted this painting to the Paris Salon in 1877, it was the first time her work was rejected, and this was her final push toward the avant-garde world of the Impressionists.

Her 1878 painting In the Loge centers on a woman at the opera, gazing through opera glasses from her balcony seat at something out of view below. By depicting a scene in which the viewer observes another observer, Cassatt creates a layered commentary on gender and visibility in public space.

Cassatt, along with her fellow Impressionists, was greatly influenced by Japanese art. After viewing an exhibition of Japanese prints at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1890, Cassatt produced her own series of prints with “the intention of attempting an imitation of Japanese methods.”

This series of ten prints is among the most technically ambitious works of printmaking in the Impressionist era. Using intaglio techniques, Cassatt depicts intimate scenes of women in their everyday lives, with intricate patterns and asymmetrical compositions showing a clear influence from Japanese artistic principles.

The Japanese influence carried into her work in other media as well. In The Child’s Bath (1893) and The Boating Party (1893-94), Cassatt continued to explore dramatically flattened perspective and bright colors reminiscent of Japanese prints.

The American Who Conquered Paris — and Was Ignored at Home

Mary Cassatt, against all odds, established a permanent place in the Paris artistic canon while remaining culturally American. However, her work has long been written off in her native country.

Ironically, her role in bringing Impressionism to the United States was pivotal as she advised art collector and philanthropist Louisine Havemeyer on key Impressionist acquisitions. Havemeyer’s collection became a cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Impressionist holdings.

Many scholars agree that, had Cassatt been a man, her canonical position beside Impressionist greats like Degas and Monet would be without question. The fact that her technical skills were on par with her male counterparts suggests that the hesitation to acknowledge her full influence is more about the state of the art world than the quality of her work.

Legacy and the 2026 Centenary

Mary Cassatt’s career came to an untimely end when progressive blindness forced her to stop painting around 1914. When she died on June 14, 1926, her life and work were already largely overlooked by the mainstream art press. Her reputation only began to recover in the late 20th century when major retrospectives at the National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago brought fresh eyes to her work.

Alongside female artists like Frida Kahlo, Artemisia Gentileschi and her contemporary Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt belongs to a lineage of women whose work was consistently excellent and consistently undervalued by art critics—often for reasons that had little to do with the work itself.

Cassatt’s centenary should be both celebratory and corrective. Major institutions—including the Musée d'Orsay, National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago—are staging major exhibitions of her work, highlighting not just her paintings but her stylistic influence and role as a cultural intermediary between Europe and America.

Play your part in revitalizing her memory by exploring Mary Cassatt paintings and the work of her Impressionist contemporaries now at M.S. Rau.