Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born into an upper-middle-class family near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844. Though her family objected to her becoming a professional artist, Cassatt began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the young age of 15 and continued her studies from 1861 to 1865. Impatient with the slow pace of instruction Cassatt decided to end her studies, and move to Paris. Since women could not yet attend the École des Beaux-Arts, she applied to study privately with masters from the school and augmented her artistic training with daily copying in the Louvre.
In 1868 the French art scene was in a process of change: radical artists such as Courbet and Manet tried to break away from accepted Academic tradition and the Impressionists were in their formative years. Cassatt, on the other hand, would continue to work in the traditional manner, submitting works to the Salon for over ten years. She continued to express criticism of the politics of the Salon and the conventional taste that prevailed there but eventually she decided that she needed to move away from genre paintings and onto more fashionable subjects.
In 1877 she was invited by Edgar Degas to show her works with the Impressionists, a group that had begun their own series of independent exhibitions three years earlier. She accepted Degas' invitation and began preparing paintings for the next Impressionist show that took place in 1879. She exhibited in the next two Impressionist Exhibitions that followed, and remained an active member of the Impressionist circle until 1886, being one of the group's staunchest supporters.
After 1900, she concentrated almost exclusively on mother-and-child subjects, some of them reminiscent of Italian Renaissance depictions of the Madonna and Child. Her work was popular with the public and the critics, but she was no longer breaking new ground, and her Impressionist colleagues who once provided stimulation and criticism were dying off. She was hostile to such new developments in art as post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism.
In 1914, after years of health problems, she was forced to stop painting as she became almost blind. Nonetheless, she took up the cause of women's suffrage, and in 1915, she showed eighteen works in an exhibition supporting the movement. She died June 14, 1926 at the age of 82 near Paris, France.
In 1992 the Muscatine Art Center's collections were significantly enriched by a gift of twenty-seven works of art by Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Degas, Boudin, Chagall, Renoir, and other European artists. The collection was a gift from the estate of Mary Musser Gilmore in honor of her parents, Richard Drew Musser and Sarah Walker Musser. The paintings are on permanent display in the Laura Musser Mansion.
EVENT DETAILS:
Lecture: The Life of Mary Cassatt
Who: Carol Ehlers
When: Thursday October 24, 2013
Time: 5:30 PM
Where: The Muscatine Art Center's Music Room
Admission to this program is FREE.
Please contact Katy Loos, Program Coordinator, with any questions or concerns at 563-263-8282 or by email at kloos@muscatineiowa.gov
The Muscatine Art Center is open to the public Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 10 AM to 5 PM, Thursday from 10 AM to 7 PM and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 PM Admission is FREE.
