Paris's Musée d'Orsay Puts American Painter Mary Cassatt Back at the Heart of Impressionism
An exhibition of 80 works by American artist Mary Cassatt at Paris's Musée d'Orsay aims to restore her place within France's impressionist group. It will then travel to London and Boston.
The Musée d'Orsay in Paris is staging an exhibition of American painter Mary Cassatt, seeking to return her to her rightful place in impressionism, the 19th-century art movement that emerged in France. In the century since her death, Cassatt has often been overlooked in France, even though she produced her best work there. In January the show moves to the National Portrait Gallery in London, and then to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
The exhibition includes 80 paintings, pastels and prints from across her career. Many come from private European and US collections and have not been seen before. Unpublished private letters are displayed alongside them.
Why she was forgotten
Curator Caroline Corbeau-Parsons says Cassatt was sidelined because she was a woman and a foreigner. Her subjects, mostly women and children, also led to her being stereotyped. Fellow curator Anne Robbins adds that most of Cassatt's paintings were sold to US collectors, so few remained in France and they were not included in the catalogues of national museums of her time. After the artist's death in June 1926, only one retrospective has been held in France.
Life and work
Cassatt was born into a wealthy Pennsylvania banking family with French Huguenot roots. She first visited France in 1854, aged 10. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where, as a woman, she was only allowed to paint reproductions of statues and was forbidden from painting nudes. Her father opposed her becoming a painter, yet in 1866, aged 21, she moved to Paris with her mother and other female relatives.
The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts did not admit women until 1897, so Cassatt took private lessons and copied masterpieces at the Louvre. She later met Edgar Degas, who invited her to exhibit with the impressionists. Cassatt specialised in mother-and-child scenes and was a lifelong advocate for women's rights. The exhibition also features a digital representation of Modern Woman, her mural for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which she considered her proudest work and which has not survived.
