This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt is best known for her mother and
child compositions and also for her color prints, based on Japanese
woodblock techniques and that combined drypoint, etching, and
aquatint. From 1890, she had her own printing press at her home.
Born
in 1844 in Allegheny City (now part of Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, she
was recognized by the turn of the century as one of the preeminent
painters both of her native country and of France, which she made her
permanent home in 1875.
She spent her childhood in
Pennsylvania, and then lived with her mother in Europe from 1851 until
1858, studying in a number of cities including Paris, Parma, and
Seville. She returned to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts from 1861 to 1865 and in 1866 went back to France, which she
decided was best suited for her professional goals. There she
spent much time studying works by artists living and deceased, and
painted with Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Edgar Degas. Her
first public success came at the Paris Salon of 1868 with a painting
praised by a New York Times critic for its "vigor of treatment
and fine qualities of color". Cassatt continued to exhibit at the
Salon through the mid-1870s, and attracted the attention of Edgar
Degas, who invited her to join the artists dedicated to the "new
painting", the Impressionists.
At this time she abandoned the
somber palette and traditional subject matter of the Academic style in
favor of the light-filled modern life compositions favored by her
colleagues, among them Monet, Renoir, and Morisot. She quickly
adopted Impressionist techniques of applying paint rapidly from a
bright palette. Cassatt developed her own subject matter, using
her family members as models because her lifestyle, with aging parents,
was much more confined than that of the male Impressionists who were
able to spend time in cafes and paint subjects of society life. From
1879 to 1886 she was one of only three women to exhibit with the
Impressionists, and the only American woman.
In 1878, at the
request of Julian Weir, she sent two of her paintings to him in America
for exhibition with the Society of American Artists. These
paintings were among the first Impressionist works to be shown in
America. However, she received much more attention in France than
she ever did in the United States. While some critics were
perplexed by the sketchy quality of her paint handling and the bold
colors of the works, Cassatt showed at the Impressionist exhibition of
1879, by 1881 she was almost uniformly praised, with two critics citing
her work as the highlight of that year's exhibition.
It was in
the 1881 Impressionist exhibition that Cassatt first displayed pictures
of the mother and child theme for which she is best known. Though
a sensitive painter of women and even the occasional male subject,
Cassatt achieved her greatest success in the depiction of
maternity. She elevated the genre from the realm of the
sentimental or anecdotal through a careful attention to naturalistic
pose and gesture, to the exchange of gazes between mother and child,
and with the use of animated brush strokes and bright tones.
After
the final Impressionist exhibition of 1886, Cassatt began to experiment
more widely, transforming her imagery with references to Old Master
Madonna and Child paintings as well as Japanese prints. Her
experiments with printmaking at this time resulted in one of the great
graphic monuments of the nineteenth century: the set of ten color
prints first shown at Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1891.
Gradually she abandoned Impressionist work for paintings that
emphasized shapes and forms.
As the years progressed, Cassatt
became increasingly involved with women's rights causes. She
painted a mural for the Women's Building in the 1893 Chicago World's
Exposition on the theme of "Modern Woman", and also helped organize an
exhibition of pictures by Old Masters and Degas, in addition to her own
works, to benefit woman suffrage in 1915.
Cassatt resided in
Europe, mostly at her country chateau near Paris, the remainder of her
life except during the Franco-Prussian War when her family insisted she
return to Philadelphia. She brought much of her work back with
her, and unfortunately it was destroyed in a fire, so that the early
European part of her career largely undocumented. She lived into
the 20th century, but it is generally thought that the quality of her
work declined. By 1914 she had to give up painting because of
poor eyesight.
Upon her death in 1926, Cassatt was honored by a
number of memorial exhibitions, and remains one of the most acclaimed
American-born artists. She is still the subject of major
exhibitions, such as "Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman," which opened at the
Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. A traveling exhibition, it
included 100 of the most beautiful of her paintings, the first
traveling retrospective of her work in 30 years.
Sources:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Charlotte Rubinstein, American Women Artists
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following was written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California:
Mary Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844. During Post-Civil War America, a graceless Victorian period, Europe attracted droves of artists in search of more romantic sensibilities. Of these exiles, none found herself more at home in France, while remaining essentially American, than Mary Cassatt. As her palette brightened, she became the only U.S. expatriate accepted by the French impressionists, and was invited to show in four of their five independent salons. She even won the admiration of the notorious misognyist Edgar Degas: "There is someone who sees as I do."
Mary Cassatt's father, a Pittsburgh banker, had said that he would almost rather see her dead than become an artist. But she proved to have an equally strong will. During the Civil War she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then, at the age of twenty-three, traveled extensively in Europe, finally settling in Paris in 1874. Where the other impressionists made a cult of painting out-of-doors, Mary Cassatt rarely left the drawing room. From the new fads for photography and Japanese prints, she introduced cropped images and flattened perspectives into her interiors. She spent the rest of her long life abroad, in unremitting labor at the easel and made herself the best female painter America has produced. Her favorite theme was that of mother and child. Without sentimentalizing the mother-child relationship, she pictured it clearly, and each time new, in its unnumerable facets.
In 1893 she was commissioned to paint part of the decorations at the World's Fair in Chicago; it was one of the first awards of such importance to a woman. Her oils and pastels regularly fetched six and occasionally, seven figure prices. When a portrait of the artist's mother was offered at Christie's in May, 1983, it sold for $1.1 million, establishing a salesroom record for an American Impressionist. Experts long debated Cassatt's status as an American Impressionist on the grounds that she was an expatriate who did most of her work in France.
Edgar Degas, the women-hating perfectionist, was Cassatt's closest male friend. He admired her talents, and proceeded to teach her a good deal of his own almost cruelly precise draftsmanship, which has never been surpassed for subtlety. From the Impressionists who became her friends she got the habit of subordinating form, space and texture to the pure play of light, and of giving her pictures a modest, if contrived, sketchiness. Cassatt's most telling device was her own: she painted plain and sometimes charmless people in classically noble poses, and with the same care that earlier artists lavished on saints and goddesses.
Cassatt was an assertive woman with a penchant for high fashion and high teas. She wasn't pretty, with a ruddy complexion, snub nose, brown hair and big hands. She was a connoisseur of fashion magazines. At 5 feet, 6 inches, she appeared statuesque, even elegant in high-collared dresses, scarves, feathered hats and parasols. She traveled extensively, braving disease, bed bugs and cold.
Cassatt herself was truly modern for her time. An automobile enthusiast, she bought a Renault in 1906. She was a vegetarian for a while. She attended seances and, while not a particularly religous woman in the conventional sense, she was interested in Spiritualism. The movement was a perfect fit: It preached equality of the sexes and placed high value on children. Cassatt never married, but she lived a full family life until her death in 1926. Her parents, sisters, nephews and nieces were always visiting her villa on the Riviera, her Paris flat or chateau near Beauvais. Even in her old age, she had a prim, acerbic wit, she found Monet too unintelligent, criticized Renoir's lusty art as too "animal", scorned the generation of the cubists as "cafe loafers."
She could also be generous. As she never lacked for money (her brother became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad), she quietly lent much of it to Paris Dealer Durand-Ruel to help back the Impressionists and sold Pissaro (of whom she said "he could have taught stones to draw correctly") at her tea parties. She was largely responsible for the Havemeyer collection, which stocked New York's Metropolitan Museum with many of its great El Greco's, Manets, Courbets and Corots.
"Woman's vocation in life," she once said,"is to bear children." She produced hundreds of children, but they were all on canvas. Around 1910 she began to go blind and had to curtail her work. She died on June 14, 1926 at Chateau de Beaufresne, near Paris.
Sources:
Time Magazine, February 4, 1966 and October 12, 1953
ARTnews
From the Internet, Webmuseum in Paris
Debra Hale Shelton in the Buffalo, New York News, Wednesday, October 14, 1998.
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