Mary Cassatt
Mary CassattAmerican Painter, 1845 - 1926Mary Cassatt is considered America's most famous female painter. Mary Cassatt is best known for her sensitive portraits of mothers and children. Cassatt brought a delicate feeling and color sense to her art. Mary Cassatt was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Philadelphia. Her well-to-do parents greatly valued education and saw travel as a means to encourage learning. Cassatt began her art studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts. In 1865, against her family's wishes, Mary Cassatt chose career over marriage and left the United States to travel and study in Europe. Cassatt's choice of any vocation at all was an unconventional choice at the time. Her decision to become a professional artist must have been unthinkable, given that serious painting was a profession dominated by men in the 19th century. Ignoring social conventions, Cassatt travelled alone, studying in Paris, Rome, Parma and Seville before returning to Paris to settle permanently in 1974. During this time, Cassatt first saw a bold pastel of ballet dancers by Edgar Degas while walking past a shop window in Paris. She would later say, "I saw art as I wanted to see it. I began to live." Later that year, Degas saw Cassatt's entry in the French Academy Salon and invited her to join the Impressionists. She happily accepted and became the only American whose work would appear with the Impressionists in the exhibitions of 1879. 1880, 1881 and 1886. After 1886, Mary Cassatt began exploring the peintres-graveurs (painters-printmakers) movement. Cassatt had been experimenting with original printmaking since 1879. The highly influential Japanese print exhibition in Paris in 1890 added further inspiration for her art. In 1893, Mary Cassatt was commissioned to create a mural entitled "Modern Woman" for the Columbian Exposition. Mary Cassatt's paintings are luminous with the tenderest emotion. The importance of the intimate life of women is captured in fleeting glimpses—a caress, a bent neck, a reaching hand. In Cassatt's art, the moments, so all-important to the Impressionists, are washed with color and grounded in loving gestures. Find beautiful framed art prints by Mary Cassatt. More art by Mary Cassatt
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