Mary Cassatt, The Independent: The Musée d’Orsay’s Centenary Retrospective

On the Left Bank of the Seine, in a railway station turned palace of Impressionism, the Musée d'Orsay is celebrating its fortieth birthday by giving the floor to the American who chose Paris. Mary Cassatt. L'indépendante opened on October 6 and runs through January 31, 2027, a hundred years after Mary Cassatt died in the French countryside she had made her home.

Chicago got there first. The Art Institute's Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism follows the restless experimenter of her later years. Paris takes the longer view: her whole career, told through the one word she lived by.

"I am independent!"

The exhibition takes its title and its argument from Cassatt herself: "I am independent! I can live on my own, and I enjoy working." For a well-off American woman of the 1870s, every part of that sentence was a provocation.

She was born near Pittsburgh in 1844, trained in Philadelphia, and settled for good in France, where she would live for some sixty years. She kept her own studio, paid her own models, and sold her own work. When Edgar Degas invited her to show with the independents, she joined the Impressionist exhibitions from 1879 on, and never looked back at the official Salon that had kept her at arm's length.

The curators, Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Anne Robbins, have built the show chronologically and by theme, and they draw on letters and documents that have never been published before. The Orsay organized it with the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and many of the roughly 80 paintings, pastels, and prints have crossed the Atlantic from American collections that rarely lend them.

Modern women, out in the world

The early rooms belong to the women of Cassatt's Paris: at the theater, paying calls, holding their own in public. Look at how often her women are doing the looking.

The mural, the prints, and a point about education

Like Chicago, Paris gives a room to Modern Woman, the vast mural Cassatt painted for the Woman's Building of the 1893 World's Fair, now lost. Here it returns through related prints and pastels and a video of its digital restoration.

The Orsay shows her famous set of ten color prints, the Dix planches en couleurs of 1890 to 1891, as part of the same experimental moment, and connects both projects to her ideas about how women should be educated. The mural's central panel showed women gathering the "fruits of knowledge or science"; the prints show women's private hours as worth the most refined art Paris could make.

Mothers, children, and the business of art

Cassatt's mothers and children were also her market, and the exhibition is frank about it. In 1894 she bought the Château de Beaufresne in the Oise, north of Paris, and its gardens became the setting for many of her women and children out of doors. These were the pictures collectors wanted, and she painted them with a seriousness that kept them from ever going soft.

She was also an adviser. Cassatt steered American friends, above all Louisine Havemeyer, toward Degas, Manet, and Monet long before the movement was fashionable at home. A great deal of the Impressionism that Americans now see in their own museums traces back to her eye.

The last room: art for the vote

The show ends in 1915, in New York. Cassatt, by then losing her sight, helped Louisine Havemeyer organize an exhibition of old and modern masters, her own work among them, to raise support for women's right to vote. It is a fitting last word for an artist who spent sixty years insisting that women's lives and women's work deserved to be taken seriously.

Seeing it

• Dates: through January 31, 2027, at the Musée d'Orsay, 62 rue de Lille, Paris.
• Tickets: visitors under 18 get in free, and the evening nocturne rate is lower. Check musee-orsay.fr for current prices and booking.
• Make a day of it: the Orsay's permanent collection is one of the greatest Impressionist collections in the world. Start with our guide to the most famous paintings at the Musée d'Orsay, then browse everything we hold from the Orsay.

And when you're there, find the Orsay's own Cassatt, Girl in the Garden, which came to the museum in 1937 with the collector Antonin Personnaz's bequest.

Can't make Paris or Chicago before the shows close? Every Cassatt we hold is on her artist page. Heart the ones that stop you, and DiscoverArt will show you where your eye goes next.