Mary Cassatt: Being Independent

Why it is worth going

Cassatt lived in France for six decades and showed four times with the Impressionists from 1879, at Degas's invitation, yet no French national museum had given her a major exhibition until this one, marking the hundred years since her death in 1926.¹ The show draws on unpublished letters and brings paintings and pastels from American collections that rarely leave the United States, alongside works from European public and private collections.¹ It follows her from early portraits through the mother-and-child pictures, her role advising American collectors on Impressionist purchases, and the outdoor scenes painted at her château in the Oise.¹ Modern Woman, her 4 by 18 metre mural for the Woman's Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, long lost, returns through related prints and pastels and a film of its digital restoration; the last room holds paintings she showed in the 1915 New York exhibition for women's suffrage she organised with Louisine Havemeyer.¹ It is curated by Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Anne Robbins of the Musée d'Orsay with the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.¹