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Artist
Mary Cassatt
American Impressionist and the only major American artist to exhibit with the French Impressionists, known for tender scenes of modern women and children.
124 works in the NGA collection
Search Mary Cassatt worksMary Cassatt (1844–1926) left Pennsylvania for Europe and never really came back. Degas saw her work at the Salon and invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists, which she first did in 1879, making her the only American to show as a member of the group rather than as a sympathetic outsider.
Her subject was modern women: reading, taking tea, boating, holding children. That last category has been sentimentalised out of recognition since, which obscures how unsentimental she actually was about it. The mothers in her pictures are frequently distracted, the children frequently uncooperative, and the intimacy is physical rather than pious. After seeing a large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris in 1890 she reworked her whole approach to line and flat colour, producing a series of colour prints that are among the most inventive of the period.
The National Gallery of Art's Cassatt holdings run deep in exactly this material, including Woman with a Sunflower of about 1905 and a substantial body of her prints and drawings.
Works in the collection
![In the Omnibus [recto] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/34694.webp)
![In the Omnibus [verso] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/34695.webp)
![In the Opera Box (No. 3) [recto] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/33339.webp)
![In the Opera Box [verso] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/33340.webp)
![Susan on a Balcony Holding a Dog [recto] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/42952.webp)
![Susan on a Balcony Holding a Dog [verso] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/42953.webp)
![The Bath [recto] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/34691.webp)
![The Bath [verso] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/34692.webp)
![The Fitting [recto] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/42949.webp)
![The Fitting [verso] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/42950.webp)
![The Loge [recto] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/34594.webp)
![The Loge [verso] by Mary Cassatt](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/34595.webp)
Collection data via NGA Open Access (CC0)
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