Mary cassatt biography paintings

An American painter and printmaker, Mary Cassatt was an impressionist painter, who depicted the lives of women, especially the special bond between mother and child.

As her career progressed, her critical reputation grew, and she was often touted, along with Degas, as the one of the best exhibitors at the Impressionist Salon. She exhibited every year at the Paris Salon until 1877, when all her works were rejected. 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.

(Effeny, Cassatt, 1991) She did not like the formal training at the academy, however, and went back to France, finally settling there in the 1870s. She also socialized with other fellow artists in this circle. She lived primarily in Grasse during World War I before returning to her country home, a chateau located in Le Mesnil-Theribus, fifty miles northwest of Paris.

Though the Impressionist group disbanded, Cassatt still had contact with some of the members, including Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, however, she returned to the United States to live with her family. 1)

Cassatt's older sister, Lydia, was one of the artist's favorite models.

Camille Pissarro, for example, was an older member of the group who acted as a mentor to Cassatt. Three years later, her parents and her sister Lydia joined her in France. Cassatt first traveled to Europe with her family when she was eleven, and by the age of sixteen had decided to be a professional artist. After a brief return to the United States from 1870 through 1871, during which she was frustrated by a lack of artistic resources and opportunities, she set out again for Paris.

While abroad she learned German and French and had her first lessons in drawing and music. A. Breeskin, of the Smithsonian Institution, notes that these colored prints, "now stand as her most original contribution adding a new chapter to the history of graphic arts technically, as color prints, they have never been surpassed".

The 1890s were Cassatt's busiest and most creative time.

To that effect, Cassatt's lifelong friend Louisine Havemeyer wrote in her memoirs: "Anyone who had the privilege of knowing Mary Cassatt's mother would know at once that it was from her and her alone that [Mary] inherited her ability." The ancestral name had been Cossart.