“You may well have never heard of Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), an American woman as a professional painter with the Impressionist in Paris in the nineteenth century.”1 When doing research on this artist I found this quote to be true. The librarian at the public library I collected my data from asked, “Who is that? Is she dead? Why would they write all these books about her?” Reading the books about Mary Cassatt at home my family too questioned who she was. I was astounded at the number of individuals not introduced to this great American Impressionist. They would be amazed amount to learn about her child influences, her student years, her later years and her similarities and friendship to Edgar Degas. As a future teacher in art education I will not hesitate to introduce my students to the American Impressionist, Mary Cassatt.
     On 1844 Mary Cassatt was born in Alleghery City, Pennsylvania to a well-to-do family. She shared the house her father built on Rebecca Street with her younger brother Gardner and her older siblings Lydia, Alexander and Robbie. Robert Cassatt, Mary’s father, was a successful banker and also Mayor of Alleghery City for a time. Mary’s mother, Katherine Cassatt was well educated for a woman in the nineteenth century, “forever having to abandon nests she had only just made.”2 Mary Cassatt and her family moved several times within Pennsylvania, from Allegheny City to Pittsburgh, then to Lancaster, and then to Philadelphia. Robert Cassatt then decided to move his family to Paris, France when Mary was seven years old. He believed this to be a wise decision, “the apotheosis of the Cassatts; but especially of Mary.”3
     Here in Paris seven year old Mary Cassatt was first influenced to the arts and culture of Europe. “Mary had seen right away that Paris and Philadelphia were completely different.”4 Not too long after, Robert Cassatt decided to move his family to Germany to provide his children with the best education. Although during the time spent in Germany, Mary’s brother Robbie grew ill and died ultimately leading the Cassatts back to Paris. With their return to France Mary’s eyes were opened once again to the arts of Europe. Along with her family Mary Cassatt visited the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Here Mary, eleven at the time witnessed “paintings that represented the last sweet word in artistic taste.”5 Artists like Ingres, Delacroix and Courbet exhibited their work while many other artists and students come from all over to see. Within the same year Robert Cassatt decided to return home to Pennsylvania with his family.
     This time spent in Europe greatly influenced Mary Cassatt to become a professional artist. “Instead of literature, mathematics, or history, drawing had been Mary’s real study.”6 Despite her father’s disapproval, at the age of sixteen Mary Cassatt was determined to become an artist. Her father believed that a woman’s main priority in life was to be a wife and mother not an artist.7 By 1860 Mary Cassatt enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where she began her student years. During this time Mary Cassatt and her friend Eliza Haldeman learned by copying masterpieces and taking classes on anatomy. “At the core of Academy instruction was mastery of the human figure...first, drawing from the Antique, which meant copying the Academy’s collection of plaster casts of the famous ancient statues; second, learning anatomy from lectures...and third, drawing from live models, both clothed and nude.”8 Although time passed and limitations to what the Academy’s collection offered lead Mary to look toward Europe.
     Mary Cassatt was not only a woman painter in a man’s world but also a American painter in France. Mary Cassatt was not alone, other American artists like James Abbott McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent were expatriates that came to study in Paris. In 1866 both Mary Cassatt and her friend Eliza Haldeman arrived in Paris to further fuel their desire to become a professional artist. Although both Mary Cassatt and her friend were rejected from studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts because they were woman.9 This rejection did not stop Mary Cassatt from her destiny. She continually produced work in hopes to have them entered in the Salon. The Paris Salon was “the most important event in the artist’s year...an exhibition of the latest work by members of the Academy, since 1791 it had been open (by jury selection) to all artists.”10
     Mary Cassatt’s painting was denied entry the first time around. Paintings were only excepted if they were consistent of what the jury expected. For example they expected paintings to be dark with a theme of history or myth, while the subject was idealized. Under these guidelines in 1868 Mary Cassatt’s La Mandoline was accepted by the jury to hang in the Salon. Frustrated by the jury’s strict eye Mary Cassatt, discouraged, writes to her friend Eliza Haldeman on August 17, 1869:

 I did not get in the Salon! My picture Mr. Frere said was infinitely better
 than last years...After I had heard my fate I went into Paris & staid there
 three months, but did but little work in fact none at all. I was not very
 well & of course very much discouraged...11

Returning to Pennsylvania in 1870 for a brief period Mary Cassatt for the first time had to financially fend for herself. Longing to return to the Europe scene she unsuccessfully tried to sell her work in New York and then in Chicago. Fortunately Mary Cassatt’s luck changed when she was commissioned by a Catholic bishop from a Pittsburgh church to copy paintings found in Parma, Italy, “she was at last able to end what she had come to consider her American exile and return to Europe.”12 Throughout her travels in 1871 to 1875 to Italy and Spain, Mary Cassatt was highly appreciated and gained assistance from artists of the town. In the meantime a group of artists were forming, who like Mary Cassatt had enough of the narrow views of the Salon. These artists included Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley and Degas. They were labeled  the Impressionist after Monet’s painting Impression: Sunrise.
     Impressed by her work in 1877 Degas asked Mary Cassatt to join the group and exhibit her art work with them. Comparing both Cassatt and Degas’s work with the other Impressionist, there seems to be a considerable differences. As Louisine Havemeyer states, “Miss Cassatt was not a pupil of Degas nor did either of them belong to that group of painters known as Impressionist.”13 Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas were not totally captivated with the study of light and they did not enslave themselves to the happenings of nature. Although Cassatt and Degas along with the rest of the avant-garde group had common concerns. They all wanted to paint what they felt like painting, not idealized but real, not the past life but the modern life. This included having the ability to paint freely, applying patches of pure color next to one another. Although as Barbara Novak states, “the fact remains that Cassatt made impressionism weightier and more solid, rarely allowing light and color to disintegrate form.”14  Together the Impressionists showed their work in 1879 with Mary Cassatt present as well as in 1880, 1881, and 1886.
     It is not until later in Mary Cassatt’s life that we see her independence. As Nancy Mowell Mathews puts it:

 Mary Cassatt’s identity was largely shaped by the groups she belonged to.
 In the 1860s, she was a typical American art student; in the 1870s, she was
 one of the hordes of American artists working in Europe; and in the 1880s,
 she was a member of the French group of Impressionists. But in the 1890s,
 ...she began to emerge as an individual.”15

Like Degas Mary Cassatt experimented with all different mediums including printmaking. In 1890 Mary, along with many other artists of the time, attended an exhibit that she was greatly influenced from; The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris exhibited several hundreds of Japanese prints of the Ukiyo-e School.16 Soon after this exhibit Mary set up shop and produced many versions of her work in the Japanese style, including The Omnibus and The Letter done in 1891. But out of everything Mary Cassatt painted she is widely remembered by her woman and child theme.
 Like Degas, Mary Cassatt leaned toward portraiture than nature, particularly the female figure. As Griselda Pollock states, “Because she is a woman artist she has been overlooked or looked down upon. But it is the very fact that she was a woman that accounts for her vision and underlying thematic unity of her work.”17 Mary Cassatt is best known by her mother and child theme because of the tenderness and emotion behind each painting, pastel or print. Edith Valerio states:

 Mary Cassatt was not married, she was never a mother, and yet, there
 are few women painters, and scarcely any men who have interpreted
 maternity, and early childhood in a language so authentic, so right, so
 accurate and so moving. She understood and expressed those beauties
 whose meanings are obscured from most mothers. The gestures, the
 movements which characterize earliest childhood, this slow discovery
 of self, of these faculties that are still untested by the world around it
 Mary Cassatt rendered with unequaled charm.18

There is one work with the mother and child theme in particular that I had the opportunity to see up close, Baby’s First Caress.
*  *  *  *

 The picture I chose for the visual analysis part of my research paper was Mary Cassatt’s pastel, Baby’s First Caress (76.2 x 61 cm). Mary completed this pastel in 1891 and it can be now found in the New Britain Museum of American Art. This work of art can be classified as a genre painting or as portraiture, but I see it as one of Mary Cassatt’s mother and child thematic portrayals. One source describes Baby’s First Caress as, “a secular and contemporary form of Madonna and Child.”19 I believe this picture, like many of her others, illustrate the love provided within a family, “...she uses the child and its parent to express a sense of the phases of family life.”20
 Walking up to Mary Cassatt’s pastel on paper I was surprised to see how the outer dimension was the same size of pastel paper I use, 24 x 30 in. About half of the picture space, on this vertical standing piece, is taken up by the mother, while one forth taken up by the child, and the rest by the negative space. How she places the three makes up the composition of the piece.  Standing back to look at Baby’s First Caress  you can see how the mother and child connect in the form of a major triangle and negative space surrounding make up two separate triangles. This as a whole guides your eye around the picture plane.
    Mary Cassatt’s line quality defines her as an artist. This pastel on paper includes the same line techniques seen within her oil paintings and prints. Cassatt uses blurred out and focused, solid, lines throughout her pictures to accentuate certain features or figures. For example in Baby’s First Caress focused, solid, lines used to outline the mother and child compared to the broken and blurred lines found within the mother’s dress. Looking up close at the pattern on the mother’s dress the lines resemble scribbles. Without the predominant major triangle, within the composition, our eyes would follow the diagonal downward motion of the lines, seen clearly within the background.
     Cassatt overlaps layer upon layer of  pastel onto this colored paper (beige pastel paper clearly seen in the left upper corner). Even still, Cassatt uses a limited palette of colors for this pastel drawing, mainly blue and flesh color. All these colors are soft to the eye. The only thing that stands apart is the dark color used for the hair of the mother and child. This provides us with a sense of depth within a picture considerable flat. The color of  the mother and child’s hair lifts them from the background, making the top of the figures stand out. As with the light brightening the top of the mother’s dress. Both the color and the light, low in intensity, are used in this picture to define the forms. Cassatt also juxtaposes the patches of pure color to the patch of pattern, found on the mothers dress, to allow contrast in a rather calm piece.
     All in all, absent of Mary Cassatt’s rich and vibrant colors one can still look at this pastel and tell that it is a Cassatt. Knowing the year of completion, 1891, we can understand the creation of Mary Cassatt’s Baby’s First Caress as a whole. Around this time Mary Cassatt was highly influenced with the art from the Orient. The Japanese prints were scenes of everyday life done in a flat manor, having simple line while pure color juxtaposing patterns. This is evident in Baby’s First Caress, although it is not as flat as the Japanese prints. We can see how pure color is juxtaposed to the pattern found in the mother’s dress. Another example of this Japanese style within her artwork can be seen in Cassatt’s The Bath, 1892. Although with Cassatt pictures there is more emotion portrayed than what is seen in the Japanese prints, like the tenderness between mother and child.
*  *  *  *
 At the end of Mary Cassatt’s life she became more involved politically, providing her feminist support toward woman suffrage. “Cassatt genuinely believed that women, because of their innate humanitarian concerns, would use the vote to improve the world situation.”21 She also devoted her time as an art advisor to collectors of the time. Although like Monet and Degas, Mary Cassatt by 1915 suffered from loosing her sight by cataracts. In 1926 Mary Cassatt died, living a complete life. “But I have had a joy from which no one can rob me- I have touched with a sense of art some people -”22

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hale, Nancy, Mary Cassatt: A biography of the great American painter (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975).
Mathews, Nancy Mowll, Cassatt and her Circle Selected Letters (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984).
Muhlberger, Richard, What Makes A Cassatt A Cassatt (New York: Viking, 1994)
Pollock, Griselda, Mary Cassatt (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
Streissguth, Tom, Mary Cassatt: Portrait of an American Impressionst (Minnesota: Carolrhoda Books, 1999).