Mary Cassatt

Cassatt began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia at fifteen, over her family's objections, and studied there from 1861 to 1865. She later summed up the instruction bluntly: "There was no teaching." Female students were kept from live models longer than male ones and drilled mainly on drawing from plaster casts. Thomas Eakins, later forced out as the Academy's director, was a fellow student.

She left without a degree and moved to Paris in 1866 with her mother and family friends as chaperones. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not admit women, so she applied to study privately with masters from the school and was accepted by Jean-Leon Gerome, the Academy's leading exponent of hyper-realistic, exoticized subject painting; Thomas Eakins joined his studio a few months later. She supplemented this with daily copying at the Louvre, the socially sanctioned alternative to the cafes where the avant-garde actually talked, and where a fellow American student, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, met and later married the academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. In 1868 a painting of hers, A Mandoline Player, was accepted to the Paris Salon, making her, with Gardner, one of the first two American women to exhibit there; it is one of only two surviving, documented works from her first decade as a professional.

Commissions kept her afloat when the Salon did not: the Pittsburgh bishop Michael Domenec paid her to copy two paintings by Correggio in Parma, and a group of Spanish subjects followed a stay in Madrid and Seville. She settled in Paris for good in 1874. Her frustration with the Salon's politics grew for years before it broke: in 1877 both her submitted paintings were rejected, and for the first time in seven years she had no work in the Salon at all.

That rejection coincided with Edgar Degas's invitation to show with the Impressionists, a group of independent exhibitors then five years into their own annual shows and still, in polite Parisian opinion, a scandal. A family friend described them as artists "afflicted with some hitherto unknown disease of the eye." Cassatt had already been struck by Degas's pastels in a dealer's window in 1875: "I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art," she recalled. "It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it."

She accepted enthusiastically, declaring of the group's position: "we are carrying on a despairing fight and need all our forces." The delayed 1879 exhibition, her first with the group, was its most commercially successful yet; the Revue des Deux Mondes singled her out with Degas as the only two artists who "distinguish themselves" among what it otherwise dismissed as pretentious window dressing. She showed eleven works, used her share of the exhibition's profits to buy paintings by Degas and Monet, and went on to exhibit in the 1880 and 1881 group shows before her last, in 1886, when she was already the group's only American member and would remain so.

Berthe Morisot, the Impressionists' other prominent woman member, became a friend and colleague. After 1886 Cassatt stopped identifying with any single movement and began working across a wider range of technique, but the decade inside the Impressionist circle set the direction of everything that followed.

Their studios stood less than five minutes apart, hers at 19 rue Laval, his at 4 rue Frochot, and Degas developed the habit of looking in, offering advice and helping her find models. No letters between them survive, so the closeness of the relationship cannot be measured with any precision; what can be measured is the work. Degas introduced her to pastel and to etching, both of which she mastered quickly, and in the fall and winter of 1879-80 the two worked side by side almost daily, Cassatt using his studio, his tools and his press by day and preparing plates by evening for a projected journal of prints, Le Jour et la Nuit, with Camille Pissarro, Felix Bracquemond and Gustave Caillebotte.

The journal never appeared. Degas withdrew from it abruptly in April 1880, and without his backing the project collapsed, leaving Cassatt with a large edition of fifty impressions of a print, In the Opera Box, that had been intended for it and never found its publication. She never again worked with him quite that closely, and the biographer Nancy Mowll Mathews notes she stopped making theater scenes at around the same time. The friendship itself outlasted the setback: they clashed openly over the Dreyfus affair, Cassatt pro- and Degas anti-, traded barbed compliments for decades, and Degas remained a fixture at her dinner table and she at his until his death in 1917.

Cassatt, for her part, was instrumental in selling Degas's work in America and promoting his reputation there, a debt she was in a position to repay because of the collectors she was simultaneously cultivating on his behalf and her own.

Around 1884 Degas painted her in oils, seated and fanning out a set of photographic cartes de visite, a device some historians read as staging her deliberately as a peer and a working artist rather than a sitter. The picture, Mary Cassatt Seated, Holding Cards, is one of only a handful of documented likenesses of her by another hand and is now in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Washington, accession NPG.84.34, which explicitly released its digital photograph of the canvas into the public domain.

Cassatt came to dislike it. Writing to her dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, in 1912 or 1913, she said plainly: "I don't want anyone to know that I posed for it." She parted with the picture; by the time it reached the National Portrait Gallery in 1984 it had passed through the Paris dealer market and at least one major private collection, though this record could not independently verify that chain against the museum's own object file, which was unreachable during research for this page (see notes_for_editor).

A watercolor and gouache Self-Portrait of about 1880, in the identical hat and dress Cassatt wears in Degas's oil, is also in the National Portrait Gallery's collection (NPG.76.33); the art historian Griselda Pollock has proposed the two works were made in a joint sitting. It is a separate object from Cassatt's earlier, more finished 1878 self-portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrated on this page, and the two are worth keeping apart: both are watercolor self-likenesses from around the same period, held on opposite sides of the same city divide by the same reclusive sitter, and it would be easy to run them together.

In the spring of 1890 a vast exhibition of Japanese woodcuts opened in Paris and, by Cassatt's own account, overtook her. She wrote to Berthe Morisot that she could think of nothing else "but color on copper." She was already a collector of Japanese prints; what the exhibition gave her was a technical problem worth a year of her life: how to translate the flat color fields, strong outline and asymmetric composition of Utamaro and his contemporaries into a Western intaglio print.

She had no real grounding in color printing when she began. "I was entirely ignorant of the method when I began," she said afterward. She engaged a professional printer, Modeste Leroy, to help realize the work in her own studio, which became, in effect, a laboratory: each of the ten finished images was built from two or three separate copper plates, worked in drypoint, soft-ground etching and aquatint and inked in different colors, printed in careful registration so the color passages aligned. The National Gallery of Art's own unique group of working proofs for one print in the set, In the Omnibus, traces the sequence directly: a chalk-and-graphite drawing wrapped around the plate to transfer the outline; a softground-etched first state; drypoint added to define the figures; aquatint built up passage by passage while Cassatt tested a palette of peach, coral and teal before settling, in the end, on leaving bare paper for the skin tones and reserving color for dress and setting alone.

In under a year she finalized ten images and, working long hours with Leroy, pulled twenty-five impressions of each. She credited him: impressions from the set carry both their names in the lower margin, an unusual acknowledgment of a printer's contribution to a fine-art edition. Durand-Ruel exhibited the group in Paris in April 1891. Camille Pissarro, himself an experienced color printmaker, praised her ability to tame the medium and produce work "as beautiful as Japanese work"; the Cassatt scholar Adelyn Breeskin later called the set her most original contribution to art history, adding that technically, as color prints, they "have never been surpassed." A retrospective two years later, in 1893, included sixty-seven of her prints alone; by the time she stopped, she had made more than two hundred.

Cassatt met Louisine Elder, a young Pennsylvanian studying in Paris, in the mid-1870s through their mutual friend Emily Sartain; the two had studied together at the Pennsylvania Academy years before. Cassatt took the younger woman in hand and, still in her twenties herself, urged her toward her first serious acquisition: a Degas pastel, Ballet Rehearsal, bought when Louisine was twenty-two. Louisine married the sugar magnate Henry Osborne Havemeyer in 1883, and for very nearly fifty years afterward Cassatt served as the couple's principal art advisor, steering them toward Manet, Courbet, Degas, Rembrandt, Goya and El Greco at a scale few American collectors of the period matched.

Louisine Havemeyer called Cassatt her collection's "fairy godmother" and said outright that the best things she and her husband bought had been bought on Cassatt's advice. The relationship was not simply patron and advisor: Cassatt used it to place work by artists she believed in, Degas above all, into a collection she knew would eventually become public. It did. Louisine Havemeyer died in 1929 and left roughly two hundred works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; further gifts from her children eventually brought the family's total donation toward two thousand objects, forming one of the deepest holdings of nineteenth-century French painting outside France and a substantial part of why the Met, rather than a European museum, owns so much of it.

The advisory relationship had its own aesthetic consequences that outlived any single acquisition. When Durand-Ruel showed the Havemeyers Cassatt's 1898 painting Mother and Child (The Oval Mirror), he reported that Degas, asked his opinion, called it the finest work Cassatt had ever done, "particularly characteristic of her talent." Louisine Havemeyer later said she learned what Degas had actually said was sharper: "It has all your qualities and all your faults - it's the baby Jesus and his English nurse." A different telling of the same encounter, recounted by the writer Bridget Quinn, has Degas saying on first seeing the canvas that it was "the greatest picture of the nineteenth century... It is the little Jesus and his English nurse." The two accounts cannot both be verbatim; what is not in dispute is that the Havemeyers paid an unusually high two thousand dollars for the picture in 1899, a price attributable in large part to Degas's opinion of it, however exactly he phrased it, and that it entered the Metropolitan Museum with the rest of the Havemeyer bequest in 1929.

In 1891 the Chicago socialite Bertha Palmer commissioned Cassatt to paint a mural, twelve by fifty-eight feet, for the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, an entirely female undertaking designed by the architect Sophia Hayden with sculpture by Alice Rideout and Enid Yandell. Cassatt worked on it for two years from France. The finished triptych, titled Modern Woman, showed young women gathering the fruits of knowledge and science in its central panel, pursuing fame at left and art, music and dance at right, and included, deliberately, no men at all.

The subject reworked a very old image, women as the agents of the Fall reaching for forbidden fruit, into an image of women passing knowledge to other women. It provoked exactly the reaction that reworking invited. One critic sniffed that the subject was "too trivial and below the dignity of the great occasion." A friend, more bluntly, asked her whether this was "woman apart from her relations to man"; Cassatt told him it was, and added that men, presumably, were being painted in all their vigor on the walls of other buildings. More than two hundred thousand women saw it during the exposition's six months, including Susan B. Anthony and the young Carrie Chapman Catt, who would go on to lead the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment.

When the Woman's Building came down at the close of the fair, the mural went into storage in Bertha Palmer's possession, where it is recorded as still being as late as 1911. Palmer died in 1918. The mural has not been located since. It remains, so far as the sources consulted for this page establish, the only large-scale public commission by one of the most significant American artists of her generation, and it is simply lost.

From the 1880s onward, and almost exclusively after 1900, Cassatt's subject was the bond between a mother and a child, rendered with a directness that avoided both sentimentality and the passive, decorative female figures common in other Impressionist painting; her women look, act and hold their children rather than posing for the viewer. The compositional debt is, at points, explicit rather than incidental. In Mother and Child (The Oval Mirror), the child leans on his mother in the same contrapposto pose given the infant Christ in Italian Renaissance images of the Madonna and Child, one hand draped at her neck, the other clasping her hand; the mirror behind their two heads stands roughly where a halo would be. The Havemeyers themselves recognized it and called the picture, in their own household, "The Florentine Madonna."

Scholars disagree about how deliberately that borrowing should be read. The curator Judith Barter reads the composition as a conscious appropriation of Renaissance Madonna iconography. Griselda Pollock argues the opposite: that Cassatt's recurring subject was the relationship between any mother and any child, not a reworking of the Virgin and Christ, and that the religious resemblance is a byproduct of a shared visual vocabulary for tenderness rather than a program. Neither position is dismissible on the evidence, and this record follows the house rule of naming both rather than picking a winner.

Nothing in Cassatt's own letters, so far as this research could establish, states an intention to invoke Christian iconography directly, and there is no record of religious observance or doctrine shaping her choice of subject the way it shaped, for instance, a commissioned altarpiece. What is documented is a repeated formal device, and two informed readings of what it means; recording both, and not more than that, is the honest position.

Cassatt was an outspoken advocate of women's equality from her student years, when she campaigned for equal travel scholarships, through the 1910s campaign for the vote. In 1915 Louisine Havemeyer, by then a committed and active suffragist, organized a New York exhibition pairing Cassatt's work with Degas's to raise money for the cause; Cassatt agreed at once, telling Havemeyer she relished the idea of putting a feminist thumb in Degas's famously ungenerous eye about women artists (he had once told her, on seeing an earlier picture, that "no woman has the right to draw like that").

Her own family turned against the exhibition. Her brother Alexander's widow and children, and her brother Gardner's widow and daughters, had become active in the organized anti-suffrage movement and boycotted the show, taking Philadelphia and much of New York society with them; because they held much of Cassatt's best early work, their refusal to lend it forced the exhibition to lean heavily on recent pictures, reinforcing, ironically, the public's sense of Cassatt as principally a painter of mothers and children. The show still succeeded, raising money for the cause and, for many Americans, providing their first real look at her work.

Cassatt did not forgive the boycott. She rewrote her will, diverting paintings she had intended for her nieces and nephews toward sale and public collections instead, a decision the writer Bridget Quinn credits with putting a meaningful share of Cassatt's best Impressionist-era work into American museums rather than family houses. Among the casualties of the family rift, by this account, was The Boating Party, one of Cassatt's largest and most ambitious paintings, thought by some to have been inspired by the birth of her niece Ellen Mary; the National Gallery of Art's own provenance record for the picture shows it remained with the artist until at least 1918, went through the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, and was not sold until 1 October 1929, to the collector Chester Dale, whose bequest brought it to the National Gallery of Art only in 1963. It did not, as some later, looser retellings suggest, go directly "to the National Gallery" at the height of the 1915 rupture; the National Gallery of Art itself did not yet exist in 1915, having been established by Congress only in 1937.

According to the account given in Nancy Mowll Mathews's biography, as summarized on Wikipedia (a tertiary source this record flags for replacement with the biography itself), Cassatt was diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia and cataracts in 1911, at the age of sixty-seven. She kept working for several more years. After 1914 her failing sight forced her to give up painting entirely.

Beyond that point the secondary literature consulted for this page does not agree on details. One popular medical-history account places a first eye operation in 1911 with no recovery of sight; another places the first cataract surgery in 1917 and a second, on the other eye, in 1919, naming the Paris ophthalmologist Edmond Landolt as the diagnosing physician and describing as many as five operations by the fall of 1919, each ending in disappointment. This record has not been able to reconcile the two chronologies against a primary or fully scholarly source and presents both only provisionally, flagged as unresolved rather than adopted; what is consistent across every account consulted is that she never painted again after her sight failed in the mid-1910s, and that she was effectively blind for the last years of her life, dying in 1926.

She continued to correspond and to advise collectors after she stopped painting; her advocacy for suffrage, and her friendship with Louisine Havemeyer, both outlasted her working career.

The standard references for Cassatt's work are two catalogues raisonnes by the curator and Cassatt specialist Adelyn Dohme Breeskin: one covering the oils, pastels, watercolors and drawings, published in 1970, and one covering the graphic work, first published in 1948 and revised in 1979 by the Smithsonian Institution Press, the revised edition issued in a signed, limited run of two hundred numbered copies. The National Gallery of Art credits Breeskin's graphic-work catalogue with establishing the print numbers, such as Breeskin 152 for The Coiffure, still used to identify individual prints today.

Those catalogues are not the last word. In the late 1990s the curator Jay Cantor, funded by the New York dealership Adelson Galleries and advised by a group described only as "a committee of curators and historians," began a five-year project to build a new, comprehensive catalogue raisonne, working from the premise that the existing scholarship rested on "incomplete information on dates, subjects and biographical circumstances" more than a century old. Cantor's own diagnosis of the underlying problem, as reported at the time, was blunt: "Cassatt virtually never dated her pictures," leaving the sequence of her working life, in his word, "totally confused," with authentication and sitter identification both still unresolved in numerous cases. Whether that revision project has since been completed or published, and in what form, could not be confirmed from the sources consulted for this page; it is recorded here as an open question rather than assumed finished.

No formal authentication board or committee with published rulings on individual Cassatt attributions was identified in the course of this research, in the manner some other artists' estates or foundations maintain. The working authority, in practice, remains the Breeskin catalogues, read alongside the expertise gathered for the unfinished Cantor and Adelson Galleries revision and the curatorial departments of the museums, chiefly the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that hold the deepest and best-documented groups of her work. One documented case of a painting sold as a Cassatt and then exposed as fraudulent is on record: a 1989 Atlanta lawsuit over a fake purporting to be an 1897 oil, sold for 275,000 dollars and rejected on examination by the High Museum of Art; see forgeries, above.

2026 marks the centennial of Cassatt's death, and two institutions are marking it in very different registers. The National Gallery of Art opened Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris on 14 February 2026, running through 30 August 2026: some forty works, mostly from the Gallery's own collection, tracing her development from her 1871-74 travels in Italy and Spain through her Paris years and into the experimental printmaking of the 1890s, with five of the Gallery's paintings freshly cleaned and studied for the occasion and rarely shown preparatory drawings, print states and unique proofs displayed alongside the finished plates. A companion library installation, drawn from the Gallery's own archival holdings and running through 15 May 2026, focuses specifically on Cassatt's role as an advisor and cultural intermediary for American collectors and institutions, the same role that built the Havemeyer bequest.

At almost the same moment, the market is being tested. A group of twelve works from the private collection of the oil executive Armand Hammer, including Cassatt's 1894-95 painting Summertime, Edgar Degas's Trois danseuses (jupes jaunes) and a Renoir, is being previewed at Sotheby's in Los Angeles ahead of a November 2026 sale in New York, with the group carrying a combined estimate of twenty-five to thirty-seven million dollars. Summertime alone is projected, according to reporting on a Los Angeles Times story, to exceed ten million dollars and potentially set a new auction record for Cassatt; Hammer had bought the picture in 1971 for one hundred fifty thousand dollars, itself a record at the time both for a work by Cassatt and for a work by any woman artist. As of the drafting of this page the sale had not yet taken place, so no result can yet be recorded; it is noted here as a live, dated fact rather than a completed one, and this record should be revisited once the sale closes.