Mary Cassatt: American Impressionist Artist
1844 - 1926
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Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born into a wealthy Pittsburg family, attended The Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts, and in 1866 at the age of 22, she left the U.S. to study art in Paris and returned only for visits thereafter. She often sent paintings back to the United States for exhibition, thereby providing one of the first views of impressionist art in this country. Her advice to wealthy patrons in the U.S. on which paintings to buy helped form some of the most important collections of impressionist art in the United States.
Mary's family did not completely support her work, so commercial success of her paintings was very important. She did not hire models and because she was a woman could not take on students. She used as models the people around her and her family members, often her sister Lydia. Although using models, her painting style did not portray a posed setting. Her work, as with her contemporaries in the Impressionist school, depicted commonplace ordinary scenes of the life around her.
One of her painting exhibited in a Paris Salon in 1874 caught the eye of fellow painter Edgar Degas, who invited her to join the ranks of the French Impressionists. The Impressionists were a new breed in modern art as known in the late 19th century. The powerful French Salon system was not very accepting at first of this new style in art. The Impressionists, not to be defeated, established an independent exhibition strategy separate from the Salons. They recognized in Cassatt a kindred spirit and a powerful talent, and she was invited to exhibit with them apart from the tradition-bound French Salons. She told her biographer,Achille Segard, "At last, I could work with absolute independence without considering the opinion of a jury. I had already recognized who were my true masters. I admired Manet, Courbet and Degas. I hated conventional art, I began to live". She began exhibiting with the French Impressionists in 1876 and sold every painting she exhibited in the 1881 exhibition.
Ms. Cassatt began to specialize in mother-child paintings around the time her older brother and his family visited her in Paris. During the years 1888-1894 she produced over twenty mother-child paintings in oils, pastels, and prints.
In the spring of 1890 Cassatt attended the huge exhibition of Japanese woodcut prints in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, which left a lasting impression on her work. A certain segment of these late 19th century Japanese prints were images of women in their daily life. These images are universal in their conception and in their appeal, similar to the women's images created by Cassatt. This may account for her fascination for them.
In 1879, a small group of the Impressionists agreed to start a new art journal that would be illustrated with etchings made by the artists. This was a new endeavor for Cassatt who had no prior experience with print media. To her amazement, she discovered she enjoyed printmaking. Cassatt's prints explore the same subject matter as her paintings. While the Impressionist journal was never published, the prints Cassatt undertook provided a different form of expression for her art. Her series of ten prints executed in 1891 was one of the major achievements of her career and a milestone in the history of printmaking.
Her failing eyesight prevented her from working after 1911. She did eventually lose her eyesight and died in 1926 at the age of eighty-two.