Biography of Mary Cassatt

By Annika Warrick

• At the time that impressionism was developing in France, Paris was the center of the art world, and most of the famous painters were men.
• Painting was a profession in which women were not often successful, but there was an exception.
• Cassatt was an American painter who joined the impressionist movement in the 1870’s.
• She became one of the best- known artists of the time.
• Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania in 1844.
• When Mary was a girl her family lived in France and Germany for several years.
• When the family came back to America Mary wanted to be an artist and she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of fine arts.
• Cassatt’s dream was to show her work at the Salon, official showcase for artwork in France.
• The Salon encouraged a certain style of painting which was perfectly finished and properly traditional.
• Beginning in 1868, she exhibited her work in the Salon.
• Cassatt loved Paris and decided to make it her home.
• While living in Paris, her painting style was influenced by the impressionists.
• When an artist named Edgar Degas invited Cassatt to show her paintings with the impressionist group, she accepted.
• Cassatt liked to paint people in natural poses and some of her favorite subjects were mothers with their children.
• Those works are some of her most famous paintings today.
• Cassatt’s color prints made her even more famous in the art world, and in 1893 she was chosen to create a mural for the Women’s building at the Chicago Exposition.
• Cassatt continued creating paintings, pastel drawings, and prints into the early 1900’s, but her health and her eyesight began to fail as she got older.
• By 1914 she had stopped painting altogether.
• Mary Cassatt was in her 80’s when she died at her home in France in 1926.
• Today she is considered one of the greatest American painters of all time.
  

  Picture Credit: www.wikiart.org