Mary Cassatt was “American, American through and through,” yet she spent her career at the heart of French impressionism, a legacy a new international exhibition aims to restore.
As a painter, friend, and collaborator of Edgar Degas, Cassatt exhibited alongside Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, helping to revolutionise 19th-century art. However, in the century since her death in June 1926, she has been frequently overlooked in the country where she produced her best work.
An exhibition opening at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay before travelling to London early next year seeks to place Cassatt back among the pillars of the French impressionist group.
- The exhibition features 80 paintings, pastels, and prints covering Cassatt’s career, alongside unpublished private letters.
- Works have been gathered from private European and US collections, with many pieces previously unseen by the public.
- The display includes a digital reconstruction of Modern Woman, her monumental 1893 mural for the Chicago World’s Fair that has long since disappeared.
Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, an exhibition curator, told The Guardian, “She was overlooked because she was a woman and a foreigner.” Corbeau-Parsons added that Cassatt’s focus on women and children led to her work being stereotyped, noting, “We hope this exhibition will put Mary Cassatt back in her rightful place in the history of impressionism.”
Cassatt specialised in depictions of women and domestic life, capturing subjects whose social and private lives were strictly constrained by the conventions of the era. Alongside her art, she remained a lifelong advocate for women’s rights. Born into a wealthy Pennsylvania banking family with French Huguenot roots, she first visited France in 1854 at age 10 and returned to live there permanently in 1866.
Because women were barred from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts until 1897, Cassatt took private lessons and spent her days copying masterpieces in the Louvre. She eventually sought out artistic communities outside Paris before meeting Degas at an exhibition held by “the intransigents,” a group of rebel artists that included Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, and Pissarro.
Degas invited her to exhibit with the group, leading to a fruitful professional relationship and collaborations such as Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. Anne Robbins, another curator for the Musée d’Orsay project, told The Guardian that Cassatt’s absence from major French collections meant her paintings were rarely included in national museum catalogues.
| Exhibition Venue | City | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Musée d’Orsay | Paris | Upcoming |
| National Portrait Gallery | London | January (Next Year) |
| Museum of Fine Arts | Boston | Following London Run |
After her death in June 1926, several exhibitions were organised to commemorate her life and work, but her presence in French institutions ultimately faded while American collectors acquired the majority of her output.
