On 1844 Mary Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania to a well-to-do family. She shared the house her father built on Rebecca Street with her younger brother Gardner and her older siblings Lydia, Alexander and Robbie. Robert Cassatt, Mary’s father, was a successful banker and also Mayor of Allegheny City for a time. Mary’s mother, Katherine Cassatt was well educated for a woman in the nineteenth century, forever having to abandon nests she had only just made. Mary Cassatt and her family moved several times within Pennsylvania, from Allegheny City to Pittsburgh, then to Lancaster, and then to Philadelphia. Robert Cassatt then decided to move his family to Paris, France when Mary was seven years old. He believed this …show more content…
Comparing both Cassatt and Degas’s work with the other Impressionist, there seems to be a considerable differences states, Miss Cassatt was not a pupil of Degas nor did either of them belong to that group of painters known as Impressionist. Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas were not totally captivated with the study of light and they did not enslave themselves to the happenings of nature. Although Cassatt and Degas along with the rest of the avant-garde group had common concerns. They all wanted to paint what they felt like painting, not idealized but real, not the past life but the modern life. This included having the ability to paint freely, applying patches of pure color next to one another. The fact remains that Cassatt made impressionism weightier and more solid, rarely allowing light and color to disintegrate form. Together the Impressionists showed their work in 1879 with Mary Cassatt present as well as in 1880, 1881, and 1886. It is not until later in Mary Cassatt’s life that we see her independence. Mary Cassatt’s identity was largely shaped by the groups she belonged to. In the 1860s, she was a typical American art student; in the 1870s, she was one of the hordes of American artists working in Europe; and in the 1880s, she was a member of the French group of Impressionists. But in the 1890s, she began to emerge as an individual. Like Degas Mary Cassatt experimented with all different mediums including printmaking. In 1890 Mary, along with many other artists of the time, attended an exhibit that she was greatly influenced from; The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris exhibited several hundreds of Japanese prints of the Ukiyo-e School.16 Soon after this exhibit Mary set up shop and produced many versions of her work in the Japanese style, including The Omnibus and The Letter done in 1891. But out of everything Mary Cassatt painted she is widely remembered