Who Was Mary Cassatt, the American Impressionist in Paris?

An American from Pittsburgh became one of the defining painters of French Impressionism — and did it as a woman in a movement dominated by men. Mary Cassatt spent most of her life in and around Paris, and by the time she was done she had helped shape both how the movement looked and where its paintings ended up hanging.

How did an American join the Impressionists?

She moved to Paris, kept painting, and caught the eye of Edgar Degas, who invited her to exhibit with the group in 1877. Cassatt had trained in Philadelphia and traveled through Europe copying old masters, but the official Salon left her cold. When Degas asked her to show with the independents — the loose band of rejects the public would come to call Impressionists — she said yes without hesitation, later recalling that she had begun to live.

Being a woman in that circle was rare. She was one of only a handful, alongside Berthe Morisot, and the only American among them. It helped that she had the means and the stubbornness to ignore a society that expected respectable women to paint as a hobby, not a vocation. The group itself was still an outsiders' club — you can read why in why the Impressionists were rejected.

What did she paint?

Modern life at close range: women reading, taking tea, minding children, caught in ordinary private moments. Cassatt returned again and again to mothers and children, but her versions have almost nothing in common with the greeting-card sweetness the subject usually invites.

Look closely and you see dignity instead of sentiment — a child squirming, a mother distracted, hands doing real work. The bath, the fitting, the quiet visit: she treated these as worthy of the same serious attention Degas gave his dancers. That refusal to sweeten is exactly what keeps the paintings alive.

What was her other great legacy?

She helped fill American museums with Impressionism. Cassatt had wealthy friends and relatives back home, and she used her eye to guide their collecting, steering them toward Degas, Monet, Manet, and the rest long before the movement was fashionable in the United States.

Those purchases eventually landed in public collections, so a great deal of the Impressionist and Old Master work now hanging in American institutions traces back, in part, to her advice. You can find her own paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, among other homes.

Cassatt is easy to file under "mothers and children" and leave there. Slow down in front of one and you notice how much harder, and stranger, the pictures actually are — look for yourself on DiscoverArt and see what you find.