Mary Cassatt

(American, 1844–1926)

Mary Cassatt was an American Impressionist painter best known for works depicting mothers with their children such as The Boating Party (1893). Cassatt was a determined artist who achieved critical and commercial success at a time when few women painters were taken seriously. “I have touched with a sense of art some people—they felt the love and the life,” she once said. Born on May 22, 1884 in Allegheny City, PA, Cassatt traveled throughout Europe at an early age. There, she developed her interest in art and went on to spend much of her adult life in Paris. She participated in numerous early exhibitions of Impressionist art, and maintained a long friendship with Edgar Degas. Like Degas, Cassatt’s work never wholly broke with tradition, but rather assimilated some of the characteristics of Impressionism into a realistic style. The artist died on June 14, 1926 in Paris, France. Today, her works are found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, among others.