Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania to a comfortable family that thought a serious painting career was no life for a young woman. She went to Paris anyway, and in 1877 Edgar Degas, already a leading figure among the painters the public was mocking as Impressionists, invited her to exhibit with them. She was the only American to join the group from the inside.

She made her subject the ordinary indoor life of women, a mother washing a drowsy child, a woman in a theatre box, a girl slumped in a blue armchair, caught with the loose brush and daylight of the new style but built on firm drawing. She never married and had no children of her own, and the mother-and-child scenes she became best known for grew out of watching her brothers' families and the households around her.

Her eyesight began to go in her sixties, from cataracts and operations that failed, and she turned more and more to pastel as the fine detail slipped away. She spent her last years in France nearly blind, and died there in 1926.