Mary Cassatt

The only American artist to exhibit with the Impressionists during the movement's active years, and one of its most formally inventive members. Cassatt grew up in an upper-middle-class Philadelphia family that resisted her desire to become an artist; she enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at sixteen, found the instruction too conservative, and moved to Europe in 1866 to study the old masters directly. She settled permanently in Paris, was noticed by Degas around 1877, and was invited to join the Impressionist exhibitions — appearing in four of the last five shows. Her subject was the domestic world she had access to: women and children in interior spaces, at the opera, in the garden, bathing. These were not limited subjects; she approached them with a formal intelligence that absorbed Japanese prints — especially after the celebrated 1890 exhibition of Hiroshige and Utamaro at the École des Beaux-Arts — and produced work of flat, bold color and asymmetric cropping that influenced the Art Nouveau graphic tradition. Her mother-and-child series in particular pushed toward a geometric simplicity that puts her closer to Gauguin than to Renoir. Cassatt's other contribution to American art was less visible but equally consequential: using her connections among wealthy American collectors (Louisine Elder Havemeyer and her husband Henry Havemeyer above all), she directed the purchase of Impressionist paintings that now form the core of the great American museum holdings. She is substantially responsible for the fact that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other American institutions own the Impressionist collections they do.