Mary Cassatt died in 1926 and spent almost six decades of her life in France. It has taken until the hundredth anniversary of her death for a French national museum to give her a major exhibition. Mary Cassatt: L'indépendante opened at the Musée d'Orsay on 6 October and runs until 31 January 2027.
Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania in 1844. She described herself as "American, American through and through," but she trained by studying the old masters on her trips to Europe, moved to Paris, and turned away from official art to join the Impressionists. She was an active member of the group and one of its pillars, and she became a professional painter who earned her own living, at a time when that was hard for any woman and harder still for a foreigner.
Independence is the thread of the show. "I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work," she said. The exhibition brings together almost 80 paintings, pastels and prints from across her whole career, and draws on letters that have never been published. The rooms move through her training, her life as a working artist, her place among the Impressionists, her role advising American collectors, and her pictures of modern women.
One room asks a question in its title: "A painter of children and mothers?" Cassatt is best known for her paintings of women with young children, and the show looks at those pictures again rather than taking them as sweet. Her contemporaries said her work had "an astonishing sense of life in motion." Another room shows her Set of Ten, the colour prints she made in the 1890s.
The poster image is Jeune fille au banjo, a work from 1894 that the Musée d'Orsay bought this year. It is a good place to start: a young woman, absorbed in what she is doing, painted by someone who understood what that felt like.
