Cassatt, Mary (1845-1926)

US Impressionist painter and printmaker, active in France. Her colourful pictures of mothers and children show the influence of Japanese prints, as in The Bath (1892; Art Institute, Chicago). She excelled in etching and pastel.

Born in Pennsylvania, USA, Cassatt's childhood was spent in France, and after some training at the Philadelphia Academy and a period of travel about Europe, when she studied the old masters, she settled in Paris 1874, and became an adherent of the Impressionists. She contributed to the Impressionist exhibitions of 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886, her work being much admired by French Impressionist Edgar Degas, who encouraged her graphic work in particular. From 1912 she suffered from a partial but increasing blindness. Her delicate studies of women and children relate her work to that of Berthe Morisot, though she was not so free and adventurous in style as her French contemporary. She did much to arouse interest in Impressionist painting in America.

The largest collection of her work is owned by the Philadelphia Art Museum.