Mary Cassatt

(United States of America, 22/05/1844 - 14/06/1926)

In the Loge (1878)

As an integral member of the French Impressionist movement, Cassatt is best known for her paintings of women and children which depicted motherhood and the New Woman of the 19th century from a distinctly feminine perspective, focusing on human emotions rather than the fashions of contemporary life. Although she never married or had children herself, she created some of the most touching images of maternity in the history of art and depicted women as intelligent and capable. For breaking the rules of nineteenth-century naturalism by devoting herself to a subject outside her own experience, she made no apologies.

Cassatt was born to a wealthy, cultured family in Pennsylvania who travelled to France and Germany when she was a child, it was here that she first encountered the work of artists such as Delacroix and Courbet, which inspired her to pursue an artistic career. She enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1860 to 1864 before travelling to France in 1865 to continue her training. Three years later, she was accepted into the Paris Salon for the first time.

In the early 1870s, Cassatt travelled through Spain, Belgium and Holland, and gained a prominent following in Parma, Italy, where she spent eight months completing a commission for the Bishop of Pittsburgh. After joining the Impressionist group in 1877, she began to move away from generic portraiture and genre painting and explored bolder techniques to depict scenes of everyday life, eventually showing her work in four of the eight Impressionist exhibitions.

Being one of the few Americans to be accepted into intellectual society, Cassatt was an important link between American collectors and Parisian artists, and her role as an advisor resulted in an abundance of Impressionist and Avant-garde art making its way into public and private collections across the U.S where they remain today.

As a supporter of women’s rights, Cassatt advocated for women’s right to equal education, equal travel scholarships for students and the suffrage movement in both the U.S and France.

Image: Mary Cassatt, In the Loge (1878). Watercolour and gouache on paper, 60 x 41.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, U.S.A.