Mary Cassat: Painting the Modern Woman

Mary Cassatt made a career painting the lives of the women around her.Her radical images showed them as intellectual, curious and engaging. This was a major shift in the way women appeared in art.     

Mary Cassatt, born in Pennsylvania in 1844, lived much of her adult life in France, to the extent that she became not an American artist but a French artist.In 1868, her painting A Mandolin Player became her first work to be accepted by the Paris Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.Edgar Degas saw Cassatt’s work at the Salon and, in 1877, he asked her to exhibit with a new group called the Impressionists.