She came from a well-off family in Pittsburgh that supported a formal arts education first at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then in Europe, after the vaunted Philadelphia school rebuffed her requests to study nude models.
Mary Cassatt was the only American among the founding Impressionists. She came from a well-off family in Pittsburgh that supported a formal arts education first at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then in Europe, after the vaunted Philadelphia school rebuffed her requests to study nude models. During her travels throughout the continent she learned under academic mentors such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Édouard Frère and studied classical masterpieces by Correggio, Velázquez, Rubens. She settled in Paris in 1874, where she began regularly showing her portraits in the Salon. In 1877 Degas invited her to begin showing with the Impressionists, and she participated in four of the eight exhibitions. “No woman has the right to draw like that,” Degas reportedly said upon viewing Cassatt’s Young Women Picking Fruit (1891). She took the thinly veiled insult in stride, and the two maintained a close friendship based on a shared respect for asymmetrical composition and classical Japanese prints. Cassatt supported herself as a successful portrait artist and printmaker, having declared herself unfit for marriage or motherhood. In spite of this, her subject was often. the relationship between mothers and their children. In contrast to Morisot’s bold, expressive brushwork, Cassatt often depicted her the facial features and figure of her friends and family with great precision. In The Boating Party, the man’s expression is obscured, placing the focus on a deftly rendered woman and child. Cassatt once said her goal was to depict women as “subjects, not objects.”