50 Fun Facts About Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt lost some of her early paintings in an 1871 fire that devastated which American city?

Chicago was where Cassatt had gone to try her luck when the Great Fire of 1871 struck. Soon afterward a bishop's commission to copy paintings in Italy paid her way back to Europe.

Which small dog breed, seen in Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, did Mary Cassatt keep for the rest of her life?

Brussels Griffon pups became her lifelong companions after Edgar Degas gave her one bred by a fellow Impressionist. One lies on an armchair beside the girl in the 1878 painting.

Mary Cassatt often modeled for her friend Edgar Degas in a series of pictures showing women trying on what?

Hats fill the millinery-shop pictures for which Cassatt frequently posed. The two painters kept studios less than a five-minute walk apart, and Degas often looked in to offer advice.

In 1966, Mary Cassatt's painting The Boating Party was reproduced on which everyday American item?

A postage stamp carried The Boating Party across America in 1966. The original canvas, nearly three by four feet, is one of the largest and most ambitious Cassatt ever painted.

A 1910 trip to which country left Mary Cassatt feeling crushed by the strength of its ancient art?

Egypt overwhelmed her: Cassatt called its ancient art the greatest the past has left us and doubted her own hands could ever paint its effect. A crisis of creativity followed the trip.

Mary Cassatt, celebrated for painting mothers and children, decided early in life that what would clash with her career?

Marriage, Cassatt decided, could not be combined with a serious career in art, and she stayed single all her life. Her sister, a frequent model who shared her Paris home, never wed either.

Mary Cassatt's older brother Alexander, more famous in America than she was, rose to lead a company in which industry?

Railroads made Alexander Cassatt a national figure: he was president of the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1899 until his death in 1906, and his fame at home long overshadowed his sister's.

A big 1890 Paris exhibition of prints from which country inspired Mary Cassatt's celebrated series of color prints?

Japan and its print masters so impressed Cassatt that she made her own color series in drypoint and aquatint, shown in Paris in 1891. She favored light, delicate colors and avoided black.

Mary Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, a Pennsylvania town that is now part of which larger city?

Pittsburgh now counts her birthplace as part of its North Side. Cassatt's family soon moved east, and she went on to spend most of her adult life in France.

Which eye condition, diagnosed in her late sixties, left Mary Cassatt nearly blind and ended her painting?

Cataracts were diagnosed along with diabetes, rheumatism and neuralgia. Cassatt refused to slow down, but after 1914 she was almost blind and had to put away her brushes.

In which Paris museum did the young Mary Cassatt spend her days copying old masters with an official permit?

The Louvre required a permit from its copyists, and Cassatt went daily to add to her training. Its galleries doubled as a meeting place, since women like her could not join the avant-garde in the cafes.

After the 1879 Impressionist show made a profit, Mary Cassatt spent her share on works by Degas and which painter?

Claude Monet was the other artist she bought, at a time when his circumstances were the most desperate of all the Impressionists. Cassatt had shown eleven works of her own in the exhibition.

In Mary Cassatt's 1878 painting In the Loge, a woman ignores a man staring at her while she looks through what?

Opera glasses let the woman study the theater while a man in the background turns his own gaze on her. The canvas now hangs in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which also holds a preliminary drawing.

Which award, created by Napoleon, did France give Mary Cassatt in 1904 for her contributions to the arts?

Legion of Honor recognition came from France in 1904, while fame was slower to arrive in the United States. By then Cassatt was steering wealthy American collectors toward the Impressionists.

Mary Cassatt showed eighteen works in a 1915 New York exhibition organized to raise money for which cause?

Women's suffrage was the cause, and her friend Louisine Havemeyer organized the show. When her anti-suffrage sister-in-law boycotted it, Cassatt sold off works she had meant to leave to her heirs.

Which sister of Mary Cassatt shared her Paris home and posed for many paintings until dying in 1882?

Lydia Cassatt sat for pictures of a woman crocheting in a garden, sipping from a gold-edged cup and seated in a theater box. Her death in 1882 left the painter temporarily unable to work.

In which American city did a teenage Mary Cassatt enroll at an academy of fine arts against her family's wishes?

Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts took her as a teenager, but its women students drew mainly from plaster casts. Impatient, Cassatt left to study the old masters on her own.

A dancer in a lace mantilla was among the local subjects Mary Cassatt painted in 1873 while staying in which country?

Spain gave Cassatt a run of local subjects, among them the dancer in a lace mantilla now owned by the Smithsonian. She had traveled there from Italy after finishing a commission for a bishop.

A relative disliked Mary Cassatt's portrait Lady at the Tea Table because she thought which feature looked too big?

The nose was the problem: the sitter's daughter felt the portrait, painted as a gift for the family, made her mother's too big. Cassatt gave the canvas to a New York museum in 1923.

During World War II, the name Mary Cassatt was given to which kind of American vessel, built in 1943?

Liberty ship SS Mary Cassatt belonged to a class of cargo vessels mostly named after prominent deceased Americans. She was transferred to the Soviet Union later that year and renamed Odessa.

Which French painter was already the Impressionist group's one female member when Mary Cassatt was invited to join?

Berthe Morisot became Cassatt's friend and colleague, and a French critic later named both of them among the three great ladies of Impressionism.

Which official Paris art exhibition rejected both of Mary Cassatt's 1877 entries, shortly before Degas recruited her?

The Salon had hung her pictures for years, so the double rejection of 1877 left Cassatt with nothing on its walls for the first time in seven years. She accepted Degas' invitation with enthusiasm.

Which European war was just starting when Mary Cassatt returned from Europe to the United States in the summer of 1870?

Franco-Prussian War hostilities were beginning as Cassatt rejoined her family in Altoona, where her father paid for her basic needs but not her art supplies. She set out for Europe again in 1871.

Which language did Mary Cassatt learn alongside French as a child, when her family spent several years in Europe?

German and French both came from childhood years abroad, when the Cassatts lived in France and Germany in the early 1850s. She also had her first drawing and music lessons there.

Mary Cassatt fumed that the jury rejecting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair in 1878 included a member of which profession?

A pharmacist sat on the three-person jury for the American section of the 1878 World's Fair, Cassatt complained decades later. She was all the more furious because Degas had worked on the picture.

In Mary Cassatt's Modern Woman mural for the 1893 World's Fair, young women pluck fruit that stands for what?

Knowledge, or science, is the fruit gathered in the central panel of the 58-foot mural, flanked by girls pursuing fame and women making music. The mural was lost after the fair and survives only in photographs.

Mary Cassatt advised the Havemeyers, whose vast Impressionist collection largely went to which New York institution?

Metropolitan Museum of Art galleries hold much of what Louisine and Harry Havemeyer bought with Cassatt as their adviser. She urged the collectors she guided to leave their purchases to American museums.

Mary Cassatt painted The Boating Party while wintering at Antibes, a French resort town on which body of water?

The Mediterranean lay before the villa on Cap d'Antibes where Cassatt spent early 1894 with her mother. She complained that the country was too beautiful and grew wearisome.

Which Washington, D.C. museum owns Mary Cassatt's The Boating Party and Little Girl in a Blue Armchair?

National Gallery of Art visitors can see both: The Boating Party came with the Chester Dale Collection in 1963, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon gave the armchair picture in 1983.

Which famous Paris art school was closed to Mary Cassatt in 1866 because it did not yet admit women?

École des Beaux-Arts rules kept women out, so Cassatt applied to study privately with masters from the school. Before the year ended she had also joined a class taught by the genre painter Charles Chaplin.

Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas, both forthright in their views, clashed over which scandal dividing France in the 1890s?

The Dreyfus affair set the two friends against each other, yet they kept visiting one another until Degas died in 1917. Early in her career Cassatt had painted a relative of the accused officer.

Which American novelist's youngest sister, an art student in Paris, visited Mary Cassatt there in the 1870s?

Louisa May Alcott's sister Abigail, the basis for Amy in Little Women, was studying art in Paris when she called on Cassatt. She was an accomplished painter and copyist in her own right.

In an 1878 portrait, Mary Cassatt painted her mother Katherine reading which French newspaper?

Le Figaro is the paper in her mother's hands, and it gives the portrait its title. Katherine Cassatt was educated and well-read, and a family friend credited her alone for the painter's ability.

Mary Cassatt's The Child's Bath followed French campaigns for regular washing after 1880s outbreaks of which disease?

Cholera outbreaks in the mid-1880s led health campaigners to urge regular bathing, and mothers were encouraged to care for their own children. Cassatt's 1893 canvas views the scene from above.

Mary Cassatt's The Boating Party may echo Boating, an 1874 work by which French painter that she urged a friend to buy?

Édouard Manet's Boating was not well received when it was shown in 1879, but Cassatt convinced Louisine Havemeyer to buy it. One scholar suggests it inspired her own scene on the water.

During the winter of 1879–80, Mary Cassatt spent her days at Edgar Degas's studio using which machine he owned?

A printing press, a small one, let Cassatt master etching: she worked with his tools by day and prepared studies for the next plate each evening. The journal the pair planned never appeared.

Which yellow bloom appears in the title of a Mary Cassatt painting of a mother and child from about 1905?

Sunflower is the bloom named in Woman with a Sunflower, in which a mother and girl study the child's reflection in a small round mirror. A second mirror behind them creates images within images.

Which Mary Cassatt painting did Degas acquire by trade, so that many later mistook it for his own work?

Girl Arranging Her Hair was her answer after Degas remarked that women lacked style in art. He admired it enough to swap one of his own bathers for it, and he kept it until his death.

Which instrument is played in the first Mary Cassatt painting accepted by the official Paris exhibition jury, in 1868?

Mandolin in hand, the sitter of A Mandoline Player won Cassatt her first acceptance from the selection jury. It is one of only two documented paintings from the first decade of her career.

Which Paris art dealer included two Mary Cassatt paintings in America's first major Impressionist exhibition, in 1886?

Paul Durand-Ruel took the Impressionists across the Atlantic in 1886 and later said his American exhibitions saved him from ruin. He was also Cassatt's own dealer.

Two Mary Cassatt pictures of a mother and child hung in which landmark 1913 exhibition of modern art in America?

The Armory Show hung her two works in the same exhibition as the Cubists and Fauves, movements Cassatt was hostile to. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America.

Which Italian Renaissance master's paintings did a bishop pay Mary Cassatt to copy in Parma in the early 1870s?

Correggio was the master she copied, and his soft, natural Madonnas stayed with her: historians see his influence in her later mothers and children. The bishop advanced the money for her journey.

Which American realist painter studied alongside Mary Cassatt at art school in the early 1860s?

Thomas Eakins was among her fellow students, and a few months after Cassatt he was taken on by the same teacher in Paris. He later ran their old academy until he was forced to resign.

Which French academic painter, known for hyper-realistic exotic scenes, took Mary Cassatt as a private pupil in 1866?

Jean-Léon Gérôme was a highly regarded teacher, and Cassatt went to him because the state art school would not enroll women. She soon added a class with the genre painter Charles Chaplin.

Which painter organized and paid for the 1879 Impressionist exhibition where Mary Cassatt first showed with the group?

Gustave Caillebotte's efforts paid off: the group made a profit and sold many works, even though the critics stayed as harsh as ever. One review singled out Degas and Cassatt for praise.

Which society leader, head of the 1893 World's Fair's Board of Lady Managers, asked Mary Cassatt to paint a mural?

Bertha Palmer approached Cassatt in 1891, considering her an American treasure. Cassatt painted the huge canvas in France over the next two years.

Mary Cassatt's ancestor Jacques Cossart, who reached New Amsterdam in 1662, belonged to which religious group?

Huguenots, the Protestants of France, gave the painter her French roots. The ancestral name was Cossart, and her father was Robert Simpson Cassat before the spelling became Cassatt.

Mary Cassatt inspired many women artists of the Beaver Hall Group, who were painters from which country?

Canada was home to the Beaver Hall Group, whose women members looked to Cassatt as a model. In her busiest decade, the 1890s, she was already advising young American artists who sought her out.

In the portrait Edgar Degas painted of Mary Cassatt around 1884, what is she holding in her hands?

Cards are in her hands, as the title Mary Cassatt Seated, Holding Cards records. A self-portrait of about 1880 shows her in the same outfit, hinting that the two friends once painted side by side.

Mary Cassatt's father Robert, who long resisted her choice of career, had made his own money as what?

A stockbroker and land speculator, Robert Cassatt gave his daughter a comfortable upbringing, yet in Paris he insisted that her studio and supplies be covered by her own sales.