Mary Cassatt

Her father made money as a stockbroker and land speculator and held that travel was education, so Cassatt spent five childhood years in Europe, saw London, Paris and Berlin, and came home with German, French and her first drawing lessons. She was 15 when she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts over her family's objections. What she found there was plaster casts to copy, no live models for the women, and male students and teachers who patronized them. She said later that there had been no teaching at the academy at all. She left without a degree, because none was offered, argued her father down, and sailed for Paris in 1866 with her mother as chaperone, since the École des Beaux-Arts would not take women.

The Salon took A Mandoline Player in 1868 and then began closing: one canvas rejected in 1875 and accepted the next year only after she darkened the background, both entries thrown out in 1877. That was the year Degas asked her to show with the Impressionists instead. She joined for the April 1879 exhibition, bought a Degas and a Monet with her share of the profits, and stayed through 1886, the only American ever formally attached to the group. Degas taught her etching and lent her his press. In 1891 she brought out color drypoint and aquatint prints made after seeing Japanese woodcuts in Paris, which her cataloguer called her most original contribution and a new chapter in the graphic arts. She also steered the Havemeyers' buying, which is why so much French Impressionism hangs in New York.

She built a career on mothers and children and decided early that marriage would cost her the work. She never married and had none of her own. The first models were relatives — her sister Lydia sat for her again and again until she died in 1882 and left Cassatt unable to paint for a time — and after 1900 the pairs were mostly hired professionals, arranged in compositions that recall Renaissance Madonnas. Degas, whose press she used and whose advice she took, looked at her Two Women Picking Fruit and said no woman had the right to draw like that. She could repeat the line either fondly or bitterly, depending on the year. They split over the Dreyfus affair, she for the convicted officer and he against, and went on visiting each other until he died in 1917.

Blindness took the work before it took her. Diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia and cataracts were diagnosed in 1911, and after 1914 she could not paint. She died at the Château de Beaufresne outside Paris on June 14, 1926 and was buried in the family vault at Le Mesnil-Théribus. The largest thing she ever made is gone: the 12-by-58-foot Modern Woman mural for the Women's Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition passed to Bertha Palmer and disappeared after Palmer died in 1918. What survives instead is what she sold in anger. When her sister-in-law boycotted the 1915 suffrage show, Cassatt put the pictures meant for her heirs on the market, and The Boating Party went to the National Gallery.

Mary Cassatt's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Mandoline Player artwork
  Her first Salon acceptance, and one of only two documented pictures from her first decade 1868
• Little Girl in a Blue Armchair artwork
  Painted for the Impressionist exhibition she had just been invited into 1878
• Woman Bathing and The Coiffure artwork
  From the set of color drypoint and aquatint prints made after the Japanese show in Paris 1891
• Modern Woman artwork
  A 12-by-58-foot mural for the Women's Building at the Columbian Exposition, lost after 1918 1893
• The Child's Bath artwork
  Art Institute of Chicago 1893
• The Boating Party artwork
  Sold off her heirs' inheritance after the 1915 suffrage quarrel and bought by the National Gallery 1894

• 1861 aged ~17 Studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through the Civil War Women could not yet work from live models. Thomas Eakins was a fellow student.
• 1866 aged ~22 Moves to Paris and studies privately, since the École des Beaux-Arts bars women
• 1871 aged ~27 Loses early paintings in the Great Chicago Fire She had gone west to look for work after a year in which she nearly gave up art.
• 1877 aged ~33 The Salon rejects both entries and Degas invites her to exhibit with the Impressionists
• April 10, 1879 aged 34 Shows 11 works in her first Impressionist exhibition She spent her share of the profits on a Degas and a Monet.
• 1882 aged ~38 Her sister Lydia dies and she stops working for a time
• 1893 aged ~49 Completes the Modern Woman mural for the Columbian Exposition A triptych, 12 feet by 58. It has not been seen since Bertha Palmer died in 1918.
• 1915 aged ~71 Shows 18 works in a suffrage exhibition her sister-in-law boycotts She answered by selling the work she had been keeping for her heirs.
• June 14, 1926 aged 82 Dies at Château de Beaufresne, nearly blind for a decade

• Thomas Eakins 1844–1916
  Realist painter celebrated for his anatomically precise portraits and scenes of athletes and surgeons. classmate at the academy
• Henry James 1843–1916
  Novelist whose intricate explorations of consciousness and society bridged American and European literature. American abroad in the same years
• Edith Wharton 1862–1937
  First woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, known for The Age of Innocence and Gilded Age novels. expatriate of the same class
• Winslow Homer 1836–1910
  Painter and illustrator whose seascapes and scenes of American life captured the nation's spirit. the American painter she was measured against at home
• Georgia O'Keeffe 1887–1986
  Modernist painter known for her enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. the next generation of the argument