Painting the New Woman
Mary Cassatt spent most of her life in France. Yet she remained, in many ways, an outsider: an American among the Impressionists, a woman in a male artistic world, and an artist who deliberately built her life outside the expectations placed upon nineteenth-century women.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1844 into a wealthy upper-middle-class family, Cassatt grew up surrounded by education, travel, and culture. Her father was a successful stockbroker, and her mother came from a prosperous banking family. For the Cassatt family, travel was viewed as essential to a proper education, and as a child she spent years moving across Europe, visiting London, Paris, and Berlin. She learned French and German, studied music, and began drawing seriously from a young age.
In 1855, she attended the Paris World’s Fair, where she encountered the work of artists including Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Pissarro, and Degas. The experience would stay with her for the rest of her life.
It began with Fire…
Though she never claimed her degree, at fifteen, Cassatt enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts against her family’s wishes. There, she encountered both the possibilities and frustrations of a word she was about to enter – from the restrictions placed against female students from studying live nude models to the enlightenment of advocacy for equal rights.
Women were barred from the École des Beaux-Arts, so Cassatt studied privately instead under artists including Jean-Léon Gérôme, Thomas Couture, and Charles Joshua Chaplin. She spent hours each day in the Louvre copying Old Masters, something requiring official permission at the time. She travelled frequently with fellow students into the French countryside, painting peasants and scenes of daily life. In 1868, one of her paintings was accepted into the Paris Salon, making her one of only two American women exhibiting there alongside Elizabeth Jane Gardner.
As artistic conventions began to collapse, with French painters increasingly embracing the loose brushwork and modern subjects of Impressionism, Cassatt resisted and remained committed to the traditional methods of painting.
Then came 1870.
The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War forced her back to America, where she found herself financially dependent on a father who still deeply disapproved of her career. He agreed to cover her basic living expenses but refused to pay for art supplies. Determined to continue working, Cassatt travelled to Chicago, only to lose several of her paintings in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Her fortunes changed unexpectedly soon after when she received a commission to copy paintings by Correggio in Parma. The advance allowed her to return to Europe, and there her work began attracting increasing praise and support.
Then came an Impression…
The1877 Paris Salon rejected her work. It was the first time in seven years she had not exhibited there. But as one door closed, another opened.
At precisely that moment, Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists instead. Cassatt already admired him deeply, but the Impressionists were still controversial. Henry Bacon, a friend of the Cassatt family, dismissed them as artists “afflicted with some hitherto unknown disease of the eye.” Now considering them fully for the first time, Cassatt recognised something she hadn’t noticed before in their work: freedom.
She accepted the invitation.
Her relationship with Degas became one of the defining artistic partnerships of her life. Their studios stood only five minutes apart in Paris. He visited frequently, advising her, helping her secure models, and encouraging her to experiment technically. Under his influence, her draftsmanship strengthened considerably. The rigid structure of her earlier work gradually loosened. She found herself, her subject, and her freedom.
The two artists shared striking similarities. Both had studied extensively in Italy. Both remained unmarried. Both were fascinated by movement, light, design, and the possibilities of modernity. Critic Diego Martelli compared them directly, arguing that both artists sought to capture modern life through entirely new visual language.
But their relationship was never simply one of mentor and student. Cassatt became instrumental in promoting Degas’ work in America and introducing Impressionism to major American collectors, particularly the Havemeyer family of New York. Through Cassatt, French Impressionism crossed the Atlantic.
A New Woman was born…
It’s important to note that Mary Cassatt never married. For her, marriage and artistic independence were fundamentally incompatible. While many women artists struggled to balance professional ambition with domestic expectation, Cassatt rejected the role entirely.
That decision shaped both her life and her art.
She increasingly painted women from a distinctly female perspective. Rather than presenting them as decorative objects, she depicted them reading, bathing, caring for children, attending the theatre, drinking tea, or sitting quietly within private interiors. Her women are absorbed in their own worlds rather than performing for the viewer.
At the same time, her work reflected wider social change. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of the ‘New Woman’: educated, professionally ambitious, and increasingly independent. Cassatt herself embodied that transformation. Financially successful and internationally respected, she lived almost entirely on her own terms.
Her feminism extended beyond painting. In 1915, she exhibited eighteen works in support of women’s suffrage at a show organised by Louisine Havemeyer, the prominent collector and committed feminist activist. Cassatt openly supported women’s voting rights and broader educational opportunities for women, positions still controversial in elite social circles.
A CLOSER LOOK: THE BOATING PARTY
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON DC
Painted in 1893 near Antibes on the French Riviera, The Boating Party is one of Cassatt’s largest and most celebrated works.
A man rows a small sailboat across bright blue water while a woman and child sit opposite him. The composition is cropped tightly, bringing the viewer directly into the confined space of the boat itself.
The boatman dominates the foreground physically. Dressed in deep blues and browns, his broad back faces the viewer, contrasting sharply with the brilliant yellow of the boat. Opposite him, the mother and child appear quieter and more delicate. The child leans curiously toward the water while the mother watches protectively.
The painting is unusual within Cassatt’s work. Although she frequently painted mothers and children, men rarely appear so prominently in her compositions. Outdoor scenes were also relatively uncommon for her, whose figures more often occupy their gardens, drawing rooms, theatres, and domestic interiors.
Yet despite the presence of the boatman, the emotional focus remains firmly on the woman and child.
An oar cuts diagonally across the composition, visually separating masculine and feminine spheres. The man concentrates on labour and movement; the woman concentrates entirely on the child beside her. Distance exists between them, both physically and psychologically.
For Cassatt, the work carried deep personal meaning. In 1914, she wrote:
“I do not want to sell it; I have already promised it to my family. It was done at Antibes 20 years ago – the year my niece came into this world.”
Eventually, however, she placed it on the market after deciding her family failed to love it as it should be loved.
Today, The Boating Party is considered one of the defining masterpieces of American Impressionism. In 1966, it even appeared on a United States postage stamp.
A New Woman in an Ancient World…
In 1910, Cassatt travelled to Egypt. The experience profoundly unsettled her. Confronted by ancient Egyptian art, she experienced what she described as a crisis of confidence:
“I fought against it but it conquered.”
For perhaps the first time, she felt overwhelmed by the scale of artistic history itself.
At the same time, her health was deteriorating. Diabetes, neuralgia, rheumatism, and cataracts gradually destroyed her eyesight. By 1914, she was effectively forced to stop painting.
Mary Cassatt died near Paris in 1926.
By then, she had helped reshape modern art on both sides of the Atlantic. She introduced Impressionism to major American collectors, supported women’s suffrage, rejected domestic expectations, and built a career almost entirely on her own terms.
Gustave Geffroy later described Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Marie Bracquemond as les trois grandes dames, the three great ladies. Yet Cassatt’s achievement extends beyond the label. She painted women not as ornaments, but as thinking, observing, self-contained people. In doing so, she painted a modern world woman themselves could finally inhabit.
