Mary Cassatt pressed her nose to a shop window and found Impressionism
In 1875 a Pittsburgh-born painter kept returning to a Paris dealer's window to stare at pastels by Edgar Degas. It changed her life, she said. Two years later, rejected by the Salon, she got an invitation from Degas himself, and Mary Cassatt became the only American officially part of the Impressionist circle.
Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny, now part of Pittsburgh, to a stockbroker father and a well-read mother from a banking family; one brother later ran the Pennsylvania Railroad. The family treated travel as education, and she spent five childhood years in Europe, probably first seeing Ingres, Delacroix and Courbet at the Paris World's Fair of 1855. Against her parents' wishes she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at 15, but found the teaching slow and the male students condescending. Women drew mostly from plaster casts, and she later insisted there had been no real teaching at all.
She moved to Paris in 1866. Barred as a woman from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she studied privately with Jean-Leon Gerome and copied daily in the Louvre. In 1868 her painting A Mandoline Player was accepted at the Salon, making her one of the first two American women to show there. A return home in 1870 went badly: her father paid for food but not paint, New York admirers bought nothing, and some early canvases burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. A bishop's commission to copy Correggio in Parma sent her back to Europe.
Salon juries remained a trial. She believed women's work was scorned unless the artist had a friend among the judges, and she refused to flatter them. One picture rejected in 1875 got in the next year after she simply darkened its background. In 1877 both her entries were turned down, leaving her absent from the Salon for the first time in seven years. That was when Degas asked her to join the independents. At their show of April 1879 she exhibited a looser, sketchbook-fed style.
Critic Gustave Geffroy ranked her with Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond as the three great ladies of the movement. Her subject was women's private lives, above all the closeness of mothers and children, and from 1890 she made colour prints shaped by Japanese woodblocks. Through friends like the Havemeyers, she also helped bring Impressionism to American collectors.
Source: Mary Cassatt
