Mary Cassatt
1844 ... 1926 · Paris, France
Biography
Mary Cassatt got into the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at fifteen. She moved to Paris, studied briefly with Jean-Leon Gerome, then mostly taught herself by copying paintings at the Louvre.
In 1877 Edgar Degas invited her to show with the Impressionists. She was the first American artist to exhibit with that group. She painted women doing ordinary things: reading, pouring tea, holding a child, sitting in a boat.
Diabetes damaged her eyesight by 1915 and she could not paint for the last eleven years of her life.
How Mary Cassatt Worked
Cassatt is useful on this site because her prints show the work happening. She pulled a print, looked at it, changed the plate, then pulled another one. Those stages survive as separate sheets in museum collections, so you can watch one image get decided. The Boating Party came after 1893, when she started spending summers at Antibes and pushed her color harder. It was the centerpiece of her first solo show in the United States in 1895.
What Backs This Record
Museum catalogue records with an ownership history, exhibition records from the Impressionist shows in Paris, and surviving print states that show the same image at different stages of her work.
Cassatt died in 1926, so the work itself is out of copyright. The museum that owns a painting may still set terms for its own photograph of it.