Artist mary cassatt biography national gallery
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She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1861 to 1865, though she found its curriculum restrictive. Cassatt has perceptively grasped the fact that the members of the well-dressed audience are putting on their own performances for one another. By including two mirrors within the composition, Cassatt established a complex spatial and conceptual arrangement of images within images.
Yet Cassatt's depictions of her fellow upper-middle-class and upper-class women were never simplistic; they contained layers of meaning behind the airy brushwork and fresh colors of her Impressionist technique. Degas introduced her to pastel drawing and printmaking, particularly drypoint and aquatint, techniques she mastered and expanded. After 1900, her eyesight deteriorated significantly, culminating in near-total blindness by 1914, which brought her artistic practice to an end.
Her material was occasionally dismissed as quintessentially "feminine," yet most critics realized that she brought considerable technical skill and psychological insight to her subject matter.
Important Art by Mary Cassatt
Progression of Art
1878
Little Girl in Blue Armchair
In this important work of her mature career, Cassatt chose to portray a young girl alone in a domestic interior.
Cassatt herself never married or had children, choosing instead to dedicate her entire life to her artistic profession. Here, the woman and girl both look into the small, circular mirror, where they regard the child's reflection together. 1905
Mother and Child
By the turn of the century, Cassatt was working almost exclusively with the subject of mothers and children, using professional models for her figures.
After 1900, she concentrated almost exclusively on mother-and-child subjects.
In 1891, she exhibited a series of highly original colored drypoint and aquatint prints, including Woman Bathing and The Coiffure, inspired by the Japanese masters shown in Paris the year before. She also learned French and German as a child; these language skills would serve her well in her later career abroad.
Today, her paintings reside in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Through her close relationship with Louisine and Henry O. Havemeyer, she played a key role in shaping one of America’s most important private collections of Impressionist art, helping to establish the movement’s foothold in the United States.
Awards & Accolades
Though largely overlooked by official institutions during her lifetime due to her gender and expatriate status, Cassatt received posthumous recognition commensurate with her contributions.
In this painting, she again looks closely at an interaction between women at different stages of life. This work was also unusual for its time in its depiction of a well-bred woman performing a physically active (if still genteel) task.
Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art
1890-91
The Letter
In April 1890, Cassatt attended an exhibition of Japanese colored woodcuts at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Japanese art had been very popular in Paris since it was featured at the 1878 Exposition Universelle, and Cassatt (like many Impressionists) incorporated its visual devices into her own work. This detail of Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science provides a glimpse into Cassatt's influences and themes for this monumental work.
She participated in their exhibitions in 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886, gaining recognition as a central figure in the movement. Following this event, she decided to create a series of ten prints showing the life of a modern-day woman. The girl, who was a child of a friend of Degas, is seated in a sprawling, unselfconscious manner that reminds the viewer of her young age, and the way that she is dwarfed by the adult furniture around her evokes the awkwardness and isolation of certain stages of childhood.
Oil on canvas - The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
1878
In the Loge
This canvas shows a stylish woman attending a daytime performance at the Comedie-Francaise, a famous theater in Paris.
The black of her dress is echoed in the clothing of other figures in the background, including a man several boxes down who regards her through his own glasses. His emphasis on compositional daring, asymmetry, and the depiction of everyday gestures profoundly shaped her approach. The completed series included scenes of women performing their toilettes, washing their children, having tea, and so on; this example shows a woman sealing a letter she has just written at her desk.