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Mary Cassatt
(May 22, 1844, Allegheny City, US - June 14, 1926, Paris) American Oil Painting Artist biography.
Mary Cassatt was daughter of an affluent Pittsburgh businessman, whose French ancestry had endowed him with a passion for that country, she studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and then traveled extensively in Europe, settling in Paris in 1874. In that year she had a work accepted at the Salon and in 1877 made the acquaintance of Edgar Degas with whom she was to be on close terms with throughout his life. His art and ideas had a considerable influence on her own work, he introduced her to the Impressionist oil painters and she participated in the exhibitions of 1879 -1881 and 1886, refusing to do so in 1882 when Degas did not.
She was a great support to the Impressionist movement as a whole, both by providing direct financial help and by promoting the works of Impressionists in the USA, largely through her brother Alexander. By persuading him to buy works by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre Renoir, Degas and Camille Pissarro, she made him the first important art collector of such works in America. She also advised and encouraged her friends the Havemeyers to build up their important art collection of works by Impressionists oil paintings and other contemporary French artists. In this way, more than through her own works, she exerted a lasting influence on American taste. She was largely responsible for selecting the works that make up the H.O. Havemeyer Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Her own works, on the occasions when they were shown in various mixed exhibitions in the USA, were very favorably received by the critics and contributed to the acceptance of Impressionism there. Despite her admiration for Degas, she was no imitator of his painting style, retaining her own very personal style throughout her career. From him and other Impressionists, she acquired an interest in the pictorial qualities of everyday life inclining towards the domestic and the intimate, rather than the social and the urban, with a special emphasis on the mother and child theme, The Bath (1891, Art Institute of Chicago). She also derived from Degas and others a sense of immediate observation, with an emphasis on gestured significance. Her earlier works were marked by a loose style and golden lighting, but by the 1890s, largely as a consequence of the exhibition of Japanese prints held in Paris at the beginning of that decade, her style became more emphatic, her colors clearer and more boldly defined. Soon after 1900 her eyesight began to fail and by 1914 she had ceased working. Marry Cassatt lived in France all her life, though her love of her adopted countrymen did not increase with age and her latter days were clouded with bitterness.
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The Bath
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Self Portrait
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Girl Arranging Her Hair
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The Toreador
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