How Mary Cassatt Brought Impressionism to the United States

I n 1892, Mary Cassatt was commissioned to complete a large-scale mural for the Chicago World's Fair, one of two massive murals displayed in the event’s newly created Woman's Building. Although it no longer survives, the triptych, titled Modern Woman (1893), spanned 58 feet and depicted women pursuing the arts and sciences through metaphor—women gathered fruit in an orchard, an allegory for the fruit of knowledge—all in Cassatt’s consummate Impressionist style.

Cassatt asserted women's independence, depicting the most crucial topic of her work: the modern woman of the nineteenth century. By synthesizing burgeoning feminist trends with the radical, modernist formal innovations of European Impressionism, of which she was the only American and one of three women participants, she was uniquely positioned to bring a new sensibility to the United States’ art world.

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Summertime, painted shortly after her major commission between 1894 and 1895, continues the landscape scene of the Chicago mural, featuring two women marveling at waterfowl within an idyllic French countryside. Coming to auction in November as part of the Modern Evening Auction, the painting is a vital art-historical example of Cassatt's role as a pillar of Impressionism, though one who prioritized feminine identity. Cassatt can be credited with exporting the revolutionary movement to the United States by leveraging her reputation as an artist to advise affluent Americans to collect Impressionist paintings. Her influence ultimately led to a deep appreciation of Impressionism in the United States. Contextualizing this rich artistic lineage helps us better appreciate the artist, this painting, and her unrivaled accomplishments.

Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, PA, which later became part of Pittsburgh, into a wealthy family that straddled old aristocracy and new money generated by her enterprising father, Robert Cassatt. Her privileged birth gave Cassatt a strong cosmopolitan background, further bolstered by her family’s four-year residence in Europe beginning in 1851. During this time, Cassatt received an education in French and German, allowing for exposure to both cultures.

In 1860, now a teenager, Cassatt began her art education, enrolling in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ Antique Class, where she drew plaster casts as her primary training. But Philadelphia would prove too stifling for her ambitions, and she departed for Europe in 1865 to explore the epicenter of modern art.

She continued this peripatetic lifestyle for most of her life, moving throughout Europe and only occasionally returning to the United States. This first period abroad as a young adult artist was pivotal. In Europe, she joined hundreds of artists pursuing careers; there, she first studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme and (the progressive and famously inclusive teacher) Charles Chaplin in Paris, then with Manet’s teacher Thomas Couture outside the city center. Perhaps most importantly, it was in these early years that Cassatt displayed a painting, The Mandolin Player (1868), in her first Salon. The piece was listed using her first and middle name only, Mary Stevenson, to avoid bias from jurors who had previously rejected her work. The acceptance of her atmospheric, direct portrayal of a female musician playing the mandolin into The Salon gave the artist tangible validation—women were rarely shown.

During her early years in Europe, Cassatt would go on to regularly display her work in annual Parisian Salons, but her first meeting with Edgar Degas and her rejection from the 1877 Salon prompted a change. Degas invited Cassatt to join his independent group of artists that would come to be known as the Impressionists. Later, she recalled, “I agreed gladly….I admired Manet, Courbet, and Degas. I hate Conventional art. I was beginning to live….”

Cassatt participated in four of the eight major Impressionist exhibitions between 1879 and 1886. Around this time, she painted seminal works like In the Loge, 1878. In the painting, a commanding woman in all black watches an opera from a balcony with her opera glasses, with loose brushwork in the background conjuring the atmosphere of a Parisian opera house. Cassatt reverses typical depictions of women as passive observers of the arts and asserts them as essential viewers and participants.

In the 1870s, she also befriended Louisine Elder, who later married the wealthy industrialist Henry O. Havemeyer. In 1873, Cassatt convinced Louisine to buy her first Degas pastel and then advised the Havemeyers on collecting works by some of the most famous French artists, including Manet, Pissarro, and Monet. This collection eventually became one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's major holdings in Modern French painting.

As an advisor to the Havemeyers and other wealthy Gilded Age American circles, Cassatt provided Impressionist artists and dealers with income while bringing the movement to her home country. In 1886, when the famous Impressionist art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel opened a gallery in New York City, Cassatt supported him and gave him access to her elite contacts who bought his paintings, further anchoring Impressionism in the United States.

Between the 1880s and 1890s, her identity as the new, young member of the Impressionists evolved into that of a painter of mothers and their children. This iconic subject set Cassatt apart from her male counterparts, especially Degas, to whom she was most often compared. The subject shift also coincided with her 1894 purchase of a chateau, Beaufresne, in France, which featured a spectacular pond.

Summertime likely reflects Cassatt’s concern for generational relationships among women. The painting depicts two women gazing intently at the ducks in a crisp pool of water that Cassatt renders with expressive layers of color. As a newly popular subject, women boating for pleasure symbolized leisure and independence. Summertime offers a remarkable depiction of boating but prioritizes the modern woman; the more conservatively dressed yet refined older woman contrasted with the young girl’s bare shoulders suggests shifts between generations.

By 1895, after Cassatt finished Summertime and her earlier Chicago mural, she was known as one of America's premier artists. The embrace of Cassatt coincided with the warm reception of Impressionism in the United States at the time. In 1891, The New York Times noted: “It is perhaps hoped that a land ready to accept novelties on their own merits, a people less encumbered than Europeans with traditions in art, may receive [Impressionism] with more sympathy than it has obtained abroad.”

Indeed, the United States welcomed the Impressionist art movement, and that embrace endured thanks to Cassatt’s popularity and influence. In addition to bringing Impressionism home, Mary Cassatt did so while asserting modern, feminine identity in her art as a committed suffragist. Although failing eyesight eventually limited and ultimately stopped her art production, the artist kept busy by focusing her energy on the women’s suffrage movement and advising American art collectors. In 1915, she worked with Havemeyer to display her own work alongside old European masters and modernists to raise money for women’s suffrage.

After her death in 1926, multiple institutions across the United States hosted surveys to celebrate Cassatt. In 1929, Louisine Havemeyer bequeathed around two hundred Impressionist works to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which she had amassed with Cassatt’s guidance. Although gender bias long obscured the magnitude of Cassatt’s achievements, revisions to art history show us that her impact on the United States and on women’s role in modern and contemporary art is indelible.