Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt came from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, today Pittsburgh's North Side, yet spent nearly her whole adult life across the Atlantic in France. She talked her father around and settled in Paris in 1866, her mother and family friends as chaperones, at a time when the official art school did not take women.

In 1868 her painting A Mandoline Player was accepted by the jury of the Paris Salon, making her one of the two American women who were the first to exhibit there. The years after were hard: early work of hers was lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, a picture refused in 1875 was only hung the next year once she had darkened the background, and in 1877 both her entries were turned down, leaving her with nothing in the Salon for the first time in seven years.

At that low point Edgar Degas asked her to show her work with the Impressionists, the independents who had been exhibiting on their own since 1874. She accepted with enthusiasm, and became the only American officially associated with the group, exhibiting in half of its later shows.

Degas's pastels had struck her forcibly when she came upon them in a dealer's window in 1875; he taught her pastel and printmaking, both of which she quickly made her own, and she in turn sold his paintings and built his name in America. The year 1891 brought her colour drypoints and aquatints of great originality, among them Woman Bathing and The Coiffure, drawn to the simplicity and clarity of the Japanese prints shown in Paris the year before.

Her standing rests on a long series of drawings, paintings and prints, rigorous in line and tender in watching, all given to the mother and child. Bertha Palmer asked her in 1891 to paint the vast triptych Modern Woman, a mural for the Women's Building of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, showing a community of women as accomplished persons in their own right.

Diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia and cataracts were diagnosed in 1911, and by 1914 she had to stop painting, nearly blind. She died on 14 June 1926 at the Château de Beaufresne, her country house near Paris; and she lies buried with her family at Le Mesnil-Théribus in France.