Mary Cassatt’s Impressions of Women
Why don’t we see more paintings from long ago done by women? Before the middle 1800’s, art schools did not accept women students. One of the first women to go to art school was the American painter Mary Cassatt.
When Mary was 16, in 1861, she entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, U.S.A. Many considered the academy daringly modern because it admitted women. But Mary thought its classes were boring, even though she studied there for four years.
In the mid-1800’s, most Americans considered art unimportant. Cassatt wanted people to take her paintings seriously. So in 1866, she moved to Paris.
Cassatt’s first paintings showed people in dark colours. Then she saw the work of Edgar Degas, an Impressionist. Degas’s pictures were a turning point in her life as an artist.
Cassatt started painting with light, bright colours. She used dabs of paint to create the “impression” of a scene rather than an exact copy. Like the other Impressionists, she showed only what the eye saw at a glance and how light changed the colour.
The people in Cassatt’s new paintings looked natural. Her most popular works show mothers and children. Other paintings picture women at peaceful activities like sewing and reading.
When Mary Cassatt died in 1926, Americans admired her paintings as much as Europeans did. Within two years after her death, four exhibits, or showings, of her work were put on in the U.S.A. The largest exhibit was in Philadelphia, where Cassatt first studied art.
Picture Credit : Google