Mary Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844 in a house on Rebecca Street in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Her parents were Robert and Katherine Cassatt. She had three brothers-Alexander, Robert, and Gardner. Her sister's name was, Lydia. At the age of seven, Mary and her family left America for Paris, to live there for a couple of years. While in Paris, their parents wanted them to see all the wonderful sights.When returning to America, Mary decided that she wanted to become an artist. Her dad disliked the idea of her becoming an artist because back then women weren't supposed to be artists,. After realizing her passion for art, he agreed to send her to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After four years of studying at this school, she found a better way of learning about art. It would be to copy the paintings of the world's great artists.Mary left for France in 1866 because there weren't that many paintings by great artists in America at that time. She spent as much time as she could, copying famous paintings in art museums. She was becoming a pretty good artist, so she entered one of her paintings in the Paris Salon. (The Paris Salon is a very important place to have your painting displayed. People come from all over the world to look at / buy the paintings that are shown there. It was very hard getting a painting into the Paris Salon if you were an American woman artist.) The judges accepted Mary's painting, On the Balcony, in 1872. After that, the Salon accepted four more paintings of Mary's.Mary met a group called, impressionists, and decided to join. The impressionists were painting in new and different ways. They didn't like the rules that the Salon had made up about the way art should look like. They didn't think that the judges should get to decide what was good or bad about paintings. She loved the paintings they did. Mary loved the colors in the paintings. But most of all, she loved Edgar Degas's work. Edgar Degas and Mary became close friends while she learned all she could from him. Mary started painting people in fancy costumes and stopped using dark backgrounds in her paintings. She stopped doing things the judges at the Salon would've accepted. Her colors got brighter, and she started to paint people as they really were doing everyday things. She kept working with Edgar Degas and experimented with different types of art. Mary experimented with pastels, mixing them with oil, turpentine, and steam. She tried to find ways to make the pastels sink deep into the paper and to make the chalky colors as bright as possible.Mary received an invitation from America to paint a mural for the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair. She was delighted and very happy. The mural was so huge that she had to dig a ditch. She lowered the mural in it just so she can reach the top to paint. The painting mysteriously disappeared after the fair. She never had any children but understood the love and connection the mother's had between their babies. Her paintings were very friendly. Mary's eyesight began to weaken, as she got older. Around the age of sixty-eight, (1912) her vision became worse because of cataracts. She stopped painting entirely. An operation failed to remove Mary's cataracts and she went completely blind. She was in bed for long periods of time because of diabetes and other illnesses. Mary Cassatt died on June 14, 1926. Her final resting place was at the village cemetery in a family tomb where her father, mother, her sister, and her brother, Robert had also been laid to rest. |