Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, into a prosperous family and moved to Paris in 1866, where she would spend the rest of her life, becoming the only American to exhibit with the French Impressionists. Invited by Degas to join the group in 1877, she found in the Impressionist circle the artistic freedom that the conservative Salon had denied her, and she became one of the movement’s most distinctive and psychologically penetrating painters.
Cassatt’s great subject was the intimate bond between mother and child, which she explored with an intensity and variety unmatched by any other artist. The Child’s Bath (1893), influenced by Japanese woodblock prints in its flattened perspective and bold patterning, shows a mother washing a child’s feet with concentrated tenderness. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) captures a child sprawled in anarchic boredom with a truthfulness that no sentimental Victorian painter could have achieved. Her colour prints of the early 1890s, inspired by a major exhibition of Japanese ukiyo-e, are among the most original graphic works of the century.
Beyond her own art, Cassatt played a crucial role as an advisor to wealthy American collectors — particularly Louisine Havemeyer — guiding their purchases of Impressionist and Old Master paintings that would eventually form the core of major American museum collections. She went blind in her last years but lived to see the movement she had championed become the most popular school of painting in the world.