Mary Cassatt

1844 - 1926 • American • Painter/Printmaker • Impressionist

"After all give me France. Women do not have to fight for recognition here if they do serious work." - Mary Cassatt

Born in Philadelphia, Cassatt lived as an expatriate in Paris, where she was able to enjoy more freedom (as expressed in the comment above), and to work and exhibit with the great French IMPRESSIONISTS, DEGAS, RENOIR, and MONET. She, too, painted in bright colors, without shadows or particular attention to depth, but concentrated on the momentary effect of light, and she, too, was greatly influenced by Japanese prints (see UKIYO-E). Unlike her male counterparts, however, who usually painted women as ornaments or as sexual or social problems, Cassatt portrayed women as individuals in their own, independent, female worlds. She reveals their relationships to one another, to their children, and to the domestic and social lives of which they were the center. She also recorded their public personas: In Woman in Black at the Opera ( 1880), the subject, looking through her opera glasses, is both spectator and participant in the upper-class urban milieu that was frequently an Impressionist theme. The painting prompts contemplation about the act of seeing, and of being seen. Equality for women was important to Cassatt, but there is great subtlety in her approach, and her paintings never made strident statements. Toward the end of her life she tried to help the women who worked at a factory near her own mansion. She is reported to have said, "If I weren't a weak old woman, I'd be a Socialist." In the early 1890s, Cassatt painted a mural-Modern Woman, now lost-for the Women's Building at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.