Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt was the only American invited to exhibit with the Impressionists, and she is the reason a great many French paintings are now in American museums. She was from a wealthy Pittsburgh family who objected to her studying art at all, went to the Pennsylvania Academy at fifteen, and moved permanently to Paris; Degas saw her work at the Salon in 1877 and invited her to join the independents, which she said saved her life. Her subject was women and children, painted without sentimentality - the private, unglamorous business of bathing a child, reading, taking tea - and the looking is direct rather than doting. The set of ten colour prints she made in 1891 after seeing an exhibition of Japanese woodblocks is technically extraordinary and among the finest printmaking of the century. She advised the American collectors Louisine and Henry Havemeyer for decades, steering them towards Manet, Degas, Courbet and El Greco, and that collection is now the core of the Metropolitan Museum's holdings. She never married, campaigned for women's suffrage and hung a show to fund it in 1915, and went blind from cataracts, stopping work around 1914. The mural she painted for the Woman s Building at the 1893 Chicago exposition was lost after the fair and is known only from photographs. Degas said he would not admit that a woman could draw that well, which she recorded without affection. She refused to have her work judged in competitions or shown in women-only exhibitions. She was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1904.

• Lived: 1844 CE – 1926 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist