Mary Cassatt
An American in the Impressionist circle
Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) established her career in Paris and became the only American to exhibit with the French Impressionists. Edgar Degas invited her into the group in 1877; she participated in four of its exhibitions while maintaining a distinctly independent approach.
Cassatt explored theatres, drawing rooms, gardens, and domestic interiors as spaces of modern experience. Her figures are rarely passive. They read, look, work, and negotiate relationships within carefully structured compositions.
Painting, printmaking, and the art of attention
In The Child’s Bath, the high viewpoint and patterned surface draw attention to both touch and design. Cassatt’s images of mothers and children avoid generic sentiment by observing posture, weight, concentration, and moments of imperfect intimacy.
Her color prints of the 1890s reveal close engagement with Japanese woodblock design as well as her own experiments with drypoint and aquatint. Cassatt’s work helped redefine whose daily lives could carry the formal and intellectual ambitions of modern art.
