Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania in 1844 and lived most of her adult life in France. She arrived in Paris in 1866. Women could not attend the École des Beaux-Arts, so she studied privately with teachers such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and copied old masters at the Louvre.

Her turning point came in 1877, when the Paris Salon rejected both of her entries. Edgar Degas then invited her to show with the Impressionists, and she hung eleven works at their 1879 exhibition. She had first seen his pastels in a dealer’s window two years earlier: “It changed my life,” she said later. He taught her etching, and she helped sell his work to American collectors, among them her friends the Havemeyers, whose collection is now largely at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Her subject was women’s lives: a young woman at the opera, her mother reading Le Figaro, and from the late 1880s, mothers with their children. In 1891 she showed a set of colour prints inspired by the Japanese woodblocks exhibited in Paris the year before. She campaigned for women’s suffrage, received the Légion d’honneur in 1904, stopped painting in 1914 as cataracts took her sight, and died near Paris in 1926.

Start with The Child’s Bath (1893). The flat patterns, the figures cropped by the frame and the tilted-up floor all come from Japanese prints. If you are in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay is showing “Mary Cassatt. L’indépendante” until 31 January 2027, about eighty paintings, pastels and prints marking a hundred years since her death.