Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt was the only American to exhibit officially with the French Impressionists. After early academic training and a Paris Salon debut in 1868, she settled permanently in Paris, where the influence of Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet led her to revise her palette, composition and brushwork away from academicism. Degas personally invited her to join the independent group in 1877, at a moment when her Salon submissions were being rejected, and she exhibited in four of the group's own exhibitions between 1879 and 1886. She became especially known for intimate, unsentimental depictions of women and mother-and-child domestic scenes, and for an influential 1891 series of color prints drawing on Japanese woodblock technique; she was also instrumental in advising wealthy American collectors, notably Louisine Havemeyer, helping bring Impressionist and Old Master works into major American collections.