Mary Cassatt

At 82 years old, Mary Cassatt physical status not available right now. We will update Mary Cassatt's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844-1926) was an American painter and printmaker.

She was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh's North Side), but she spent a majority of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later displayed among the Impressionists.

Cassatt used to create snapshots of women's professional and private lives, with particular emphasis on mother-child relationships. She was named as one of "three grand dames" (the three great ladies) of Impressionism by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 (the three great ladies) of Impressionism, alongside Marie Bracemond and Berthe Morisot.

Diego Martelli, a French explorer who compared her to Degas in 1879, compared her to Degas as they both sought to express movement, light, and architecture in the most modern sense.

Early life

Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, which is now a part of Pittsburgh. She was born into a wealthy middle-class family: Robert Simpson Cassat (later Cassatt) was a successful stockbroker and land speculator. Cossart's ancestral name had existed since his ancestor, French Huguenot Jacques Cossart, who immigrated to New Amsterdam in 1662. Katherine Kelso Johnston's mother, Katherine Kelso Johnston, came from a banking family. Katherine Cassatt, a scholar and well-read, had a major influence on her daughter. To that effect, Cassatt's lifelong friend Louisine Havemeyer wrote in her memoirs: "Anyone who had the privilege of knowing Mary Cassatt's mother would know at once that it was from her and she alone that [Mary] inherited her ability." Cassatt's distant cousin was one of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. Alexander Johnston Cassatt, a brother, served as president of Pennsylvania Railway Johnston Cassatt. The family migrated eastward, first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then to the Philadelphia area, where she began her education at the age of six.

Cassatt grew up in an environment where travel was seen as integral to education; she spent five years in Europe and visited many of Europe's capitals, including London, Paris, and Berlin; she also spent time in London, Paris, and Berlin. While studying in France, she learned German and French and had her first lessons in drawing and music. It is likely that Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet were among the first French artists to attend the Paris World's Fair of 1855. Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, both of whom were later her colleagues and mentors, were also on the show.

Cassatt began painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia at the age of 15. Cassatt's exposure to feminist theories and some of the male students' bohemian conduct may have been a source of her parents' skepticism. Cassatt and her circle of friends, as such, were lifelong advocates of equal rights for the sexes. Although 20% of the students were female, the majority saw art as a socially valuable talent; however, few of them were determined, as Cassatt was, to make art their profession. She continued her studies from 1861 to 1865, during the American Civil War. Thomas Eakins was one of her classmates; later, Eakins was coerced to resign as the Academy's director.

She decided to study the old masters on her own, frustrated with the stalemate of instruction and the male students' patronizing attitude. Later, she said, "There was no teaching" at the Academy. Female students were unable to use live models until a short time, and principal instruction was mainly based on casts.

Cassatt's decision to leave her studies: At that time, no degree was awarded. After overcoming her father's objections, she returned to Paris in 1866, with her mother and family friends acting as chaperones. Cassatt applied to study privately with masters from the university and was accepted to study with Jean-Lérôme, a highly respected tutor known for his hyper-realistic approach and his portrayal of exotic subjects. (Gérôme accepted Eakins as a student a few months later.) Cassatt's artistic education continued by daily copying in the Louvre, obtaining the required license to regulate the "copyists," mainly low-paid women who occasionally packed the museum to print copies for sale. In addition, the museum served as a social gathering for Frenchmen and American female students, who, as Cassatt, were not allowed to attend cafes where the avant-garde socialized. Elizabeth Jane Gardner, a fellow artist and friend, met and married William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who was known as a renowned academic painter.

She enrolled in a painting class with Charles Joshua Chaplin, a genre artist, towards the end of 1866. Cassatt studied with artist Thomas Couture in 1868, but his interests tended to be romantic and urban. The students drew from life on trips to the countryside, particularly the peasants who were engaged in daily life. The selection jury for the Paris Salon accepted A Mandoline Player, one of her paintings, for the first time in 1868. Cassatt was one of two American women to first exhibit in the Salon with Elizabeth Jane Gardner, whose work was also accepted by the jury this year. A Mandoline Player is one of only two paintings from Corot and Couture's first decade of her career that is preserved today.

The French art scene was witnessing changes as experimental artists such as Courbet and Édouard Manet tried to break away from accepted Academic tradition and the Impressionists were in their formative years. Artists "are leaving the Academy style and each seeking a new direction, and ultimately, everything is chaos," Eliza Haldeman wrote home. Cassatt, on the other hand, resumed to work in the traditional way, submitting assignments to the Salon for more than ten years with increasing annoyance.

In the late summer of 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War was beginning, Capt. Cassatt and her family lived in Altoona. Her father continued to refuse her chosen career and paid for her basic needs, but not her art supplies. Cassatt's two paintings were on sale in a New York gallery and attracted a lot of admirers but no buyers. When staying at her summer home, she was also dissatisfied with the lack of paintings to study. Cassatt had even considered giving up art because she was determined to make a life on her own. "I have given up my studio and torn up my father's portrait," she wrote in a letter from July 1871. And no one has ever touched a brush until I see any hint of returning to Europe. I am extremely excited to go out west and get some jobs, but I haven't decided where."

Cassatt went to Chicago to try her luck, but she didn't have any of her early paintings in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Her artwork attracted Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Domenec of Pittsburgh, who commissioned her to paint two copies of paintings by Correggio in Parma, Italy, advancing her enough funds to pay for her travel expenses and a portion of her stay. "O how exciting I am going to work, my fingers itch, and my eyes water to see a fine photo again," she wrote. Cassatt and Emily Sartain, a colleague artist from Philadelphia's well-known cultural family, set out for Europe for the second time.

Later life

Cassatt's reputation is based on a long line of rigorously researched and tenderly observed paintings and prints focusing on the mother and her child. Gardner Held by His Mother is the oldest known work on this subject, although she had painted several earlier works on the theme, although she dated "Jan/88" is in the New York Public Library. Any of these works depict her own relatives, acquaintances, or clients, although she did mainly use professional models in compositions that are often reminiscent of Italian Renaissance depictions of the Madonna and Child. She concentrated almost exclusively on mother-and-child subjects, such as Woman with a Sunflower, after 1900. "Cassatt denied the possibility of becoming a wife and mother," the viewer may be surprised to learn that despite her emphasis on depicting mother-child pairs in her portraits.

The 1890s were Cassatt's busiest and most inventive period. She had grown up and became more diplomatic and less blunt in her views. She also became a role model for a young American artist who needed her assistance. Lucy A. Bacon, Cassatt's niece to Camille Pissarro, was one of them. Despite the Impressionist party's disbandement, Cassatt maintained contact with some of the group's members, including Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro.

Woman Bathing and The Coiffure were two of two of her highly original colored drypoint and aquatint prints on view in Paris in 1891, inspired by the Japanese masters' appearance in Paris the year before. (See Japanism) Cassatt was attracted by the simplicity and clarity of Japanese architecture's work, as well as the skillful use of blocks of color. She mainly used light, delicate pastel colors and avoided black (a "forbidden" color among the Impressionists). These colored prints, according to Adelyn D. Breeskin, author of two catalogue raisonnés of Cassatt's work, "now stand as her most original contribution" and "have never been outmatched in terms of graphic arts...technically, as color prints, they have never been surpassed."

Bertha Palmer, a Chicago businesswoman, contacted Cassatt in 1891 to paint a 12' 58' mural about "Modern Women" for the Women's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition, which was also held in 1893. Cassatt completed the project over the next two years while living in France with her mother, who lived in France. The mural was created as a triptych. The central theme was Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science. Young Girls Pursuing Fame and the right panel Arts, Music, Dancing were among the left panels on the left panel. The mural depicts a community of women separate from their male counterparts, as competent individuals in their own right. Palmer considered Cassatt to be a national treasure, and there could not be a better time to paint a mural at an exhibit that was to do so much to bring the world's attention on women's status. The mural was unfortunately not surviving after the exhibition was closed down. Cassatt did several research and paintings on topics similar to those in the mural, so it's likely that her ideas and pictures would have been displayed. In the Exposition, Cassatt also displayed other works.

Cassatt was an advisor to several major art collectors and pledged that their funds be donated to American art museums as the new century arrived. France honoured her with the Légion d'honneur in 1904 for her contributions to the arts. Although she was instrumental in advising American collectors, her art was becoming more popular in the United States. And among her family members back in America, she got no recognition and was completely overshadowed by her famous brother.

Alexander Cassatt, Mary Cassatt's brother, served on the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1899 to 1906. She was shocked because they had been close, but she continued to be very efficient in the years leading up to 1910. An increasing sentimentality is evident in her 1900s paintings; her career was highly regarded by the public and scholars, but her Impressionist coworkers, who had once provided encouragement and criticism, were dying. She was resistant to such new art movements as post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Two of her exhibits appeared in the Armory Exhibition of 1913, depicting a woman and her child.

A trip to Egypt in 1910 brought Cassatt with the beauty of its ancient art, but the trip ended with a crisis of ingenuity; "I fought against it but it triumphed, but it is surely the greatest Art the past has left us," says the woman. Diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia, and cataracts in 1911, she did not slow down, but she was forced to stop painting after 1914, becoming almost blind.

Cassatt died in Le Mesnil-Théribus, France, on June 14, 1926, near Beaufresne, near Paris, and was buried in the family vault.

Source