Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) has always been classified as among the French Impressionists rather than the American impressionists, with she and Berthe Morisot as the only two female painters within this school. Cassatt had showed her early paintings in the Paris Salon and after her later paintings were rejected, Edgar Degas invited her to show her work with the Impressionists and she did. I find though that her art is consistently different than most of the work of the other French Impressionists because of Cassatt's focus on the psychological moment and her perspicacity in painting children. In this she reminds far more of such Renaissance giants as Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1490-1576) and the great painter of the Spanish Golden Age, Diego Velasquez.

Born into a prominent and wealthy family near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Mary began her education at the age of six in Philadelphia where her family had moved. At the age of 15 she began to study art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a determination to become a professional artist. Although her family did not agree with Mary's commitment to becoming a professional, they nevertheless did everything to support it. Her mother went with her on European tours--an obligatory part of every wealthy young American's education at the time--but in Mary's case, this meant long stays in Spain where Mary studied and copied great works in the Prado, such as those of Velasquez, in Italy where she studied the great artists of the Renaissance, and to the Netherlands, where she studied the works of the Dutch Golden Age, such as Vermeer and Rembrandt.