Mary Cassatt Prints

About Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt was born in May 1844 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1861 to 1865 before going to Paris, where she took private lessons with Jean-Léon Gérôme and Charles Chaplin because the École des Beaux-Arts did not admit women. She settled in Paris in 1874 and exhibited at the Salon until Edgar Degas, who had admired her work, invited her to show with the Impressionists in 1879; she was the only American in the group. Her subject was the modern woman at the theatre, at tea, reading, and above all mothers and children handled without sentimentality, as in The Child's Bath of 1893, now in the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1891 she exhibited a series of ten colour prints in drypoint and aquatint made after studying the Japanese woodblocks shown in Paris the previous year, and they remain among the finest prints of the century. She painted a mural for the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, received the Légion d'honneur in 1904, and advised American collectors on buying Impressionist pictures. She died at her château near Paris in June 1926. Cassatt's clear colour and strong, simple design make her pictures read as cleanly on a wall as on the page.