Mary Cassatt was a painter and printmaker who was originally from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. She was known for focusing on the social and private lives of women and had the recurring theme of the intimacy between mothers and their children. She was known as one of the most important artists of the Impressionist era.
Image Credit: By Mary Cassatt – Huntington Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20441933
Her mother, Katherine, was an educated, well-read woman who strongly encouraged Cassatt from a young age. Eventually, Cassatt traveled to Europe for five years and met Edgar Degas, who inspired her to become an artist. She started attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at the age of fifteen. But while she was there, she felt as if she was learning too slowly. Female students were not allowed to use live models and instead had to use casts of models. This, combined with the condescending attitude of her teachers and the male students, lead her to leave the academy to study the old masters of art on her own.
Image Credit: By Mary Cassatt – Art Institute of Chicago, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14695056
She later moved to Paris in 1866, where she took private lessons from the masters at the École des Beaux-Arts. Though women were not admitted into the cafes in Paris where many famous painters spent their time, Cassatt and several other female artists at the time would paint the masterpieces in the museums of Paris. They were required to gain a special permit to paint inside the museum. Image Credit: By Mary Cassatt – National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., online collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67682589
Cassatt was also a strong advocate for women’s equality. With her friends, she campaigned for female students to gain travel scholarships and for the right to vote in the 1910s. She showed an exhibition of her artwork to support the women’s rights movement, and her own sister-in-law, an anti-suffragette, boycotted it. Though Cassat never made explicit statements regarding women’s rights in her artwork, her expressive portrayal of women in their private lives showed that women of the time had lives which most forms of media did not show and had not been represented by male artists of the era and the past.
Image Credit: By Mary Cassatt – hgFHmM5TCxBrqg at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21909487
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cassatt
https://www.biography.com/artist/mary-cassatt