Although Grace Hartigan, who died recently, is considered widely as one of the best women painters in the US, the best of course was Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). Of rich lineage, she was the daughter of a banker, land speculator, and stockbroker based largely in Philadelphia. Her childhood and teenage years were spent there. However, at the tender age of ten years she travelled to Europe along with some of her family members.
After visiting Berlin (where she learnt German) and London, she reached Paris to learn French, music, and drawing. She was exposed there to the art of Ingres, Courbet, Corot, Delacroix, Degas, and Pissarro, who were all renowned French painters. The last two painters' art gripped her interest.
Young children are impressionable and the exposure surely lit a spark in her mind then. Though she returned back to the US then, she had already decided to become an artist in her own right.
To set fire to the ambition already burning within her, she joined the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1860. This she did despite the strong objections that the elders in her family raised to her overture.
However, at the Academy, she was always far ahead of the other students in her class and found the slow pace of instructions too boring for it did not make her learn anything new. Although, she still continued her studies, she had determined that art would be her vocation in life. She was also sure that Paris would be her ultimate destination.
So, at the age of 23 years, she left her studies midway and made a return to Paris (with her mother) to take up learning drawing and painting in all seriousness, where Degas and Pissarro later became her mentors. In those days, it seems that women were not allowed entry into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. So, she took private tuitions from Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the masters there.
She learned a lot in Paris and one of her paintings, A Mandolin Player, was accepted as an entry to the Paris Salon. Mary returned back to the US in 1870 and found admirers for her paintings. She bagged a paid painting assignment in Italy and returned to Europe in 1871. From then on her art received acclaim even in Spain and found buyers. Encouraged, she took up residence in Paris in 1874.
In those times, works by female painters were looked on with contempt. In reaction, Mary Cassatt decided to paint only female subjects and children from then on. Most of her art reflects the relationship between a mother and daughter/son, although Mary never married. She even had a running fight with the jury at the Paris Salon because of the dark backgrounds she painted.
In 1877, Mary Cassatt became intensely enchanted with the painting style of the Impressionist painter Edgar Degas, who already had impressed her from the beginning. Her whole art from then on reflected the Impressionist emphasis.
Some of her best paintings include those that depicted ordinary people with vividness that women painters of the period simply were not believed to have been credited with. She leaves behind a rich legacy which generations of people will admire.
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