Mary Cassatt
(May 22, 1844 - June 14, 1926) |
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portraits of women & children Art Work
| Name: |
Mary Cassatt |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Allegheny City, PA, USA |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
May 22, 1844 |
| Death: |
June 14, 1926 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
portraits of women & children |
| Medium: |
oil painting, pastel, etching |
| Method: |
oil painting, pastel, etching |
| Style: |
Impressionism |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
Printmaker
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Biography
Born 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, Mary Stevenson Cassatt was the daughter of a wealthy banker. She received her artistic training at Philadelphia's Academy of Fine Arts, but quickly grew tired of the slow pace of teaching and the school's prejudice against women painters. Under her father's auspices, Cassatt then set off for Europe, where she planned to practice her skills in the leading art centers of the day, Paris and Rome. As was called for by propriety, a female friend or her mother always accompanied her. For many years Cassatt traveled throughout Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and France, copying the works of the Old Masters and working under different artists.
The painter settled permanently in France and first exhibited her work at the Paris Salon in 1868. However, Cassatt rapidly became disillusioned with the establishment. She began to regard the majority of the paintings on show there as unsatisfactory and bland. Year by year, artists such as Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas or Claude Monet had their paintings rejected by the Salon's conservative judges. The two paintings submitted by Mary Cassatt in 1877 were also declined.
Working Paris brought Cassatt into contact with many of the leading Impressionist artists of the period, including Degas and Monet, who she became good friends with. In 1877, after being rejected by the Salon, Cassatt joined the Impressionist Exhibition, showing twelve works, among them her study At the Opera. With its generous treatment of color, this painting was probably too sketchily rendered even by Impressionist standards to be considered adequate. Its theme is a scene from contemporary city life, a favorite subject among the Impressionists. Nevertheless, Cassatt would be an influential member of the French Impressionist movement until 1886, when she began moving away from the group and experimenting with a greater variety of stylistic techniques.
While they were a source of motifs for many male artists, the nightclubs and dancehalls frequented by the demimonde were off limits to a respectable woman like Cassatt, who was therefore obliged to observe the activities of the fashionable bourgeoisie at the Paris. She recorded the everyday life of bourgeois women, which was centered on the home. She took a particular interest in mother and child scenes, in which she lends her female subjects an almost Madonna-like dignity. These paintings were extremely popular in France and America and, partly at the insistence of her art dealers, Cassatt produced more and more variations on the theme from the 1880s onwards.
To the end Cassatt continued to paint women at work, at home, and at play. An advocate of women's rights, she held women responsible for their own advancement. American women have been spoiled, treated and indulged like children, she observed late in life, they must wake up to their duties. By 1915 eye trouble forced Cassatt to give up painting. She remained a fixture of American expatriate society for another decade, dying at her country home outside Paris on 14 June 1926.
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Samples of Work
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