Mary Cassatt
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Mary Cassatt trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mary Cassatt was the American invited into the most rebellious art group in Europe. She crossed the Atlantic to train as a painter despite her father's doubts, exhibited with the French Impressionists, and became famous for tender, unsentimental pictures of mothers and children. These fun facts in quiz form follow her whole story: a well-traveled childhood, art classes taken against her family's wishes, the long friendship with Edgar Degas, the pets she adored, her bold experiments in color, a giant mural that vanished, and the collectors she steered toward modern painting. Expect a few surprises about her relatives and her final years too. The questions suit curious kids, students, teachers and art lovers alike. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mary Cassatt lost some of her early paintings in an 1871 fire that devastated which American city?
Chicago
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.
Q 02Which small dog breed, seen in Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, did Mary Cassatt keep for the rest of her life?
Brussels Griffon
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.
Q 03Mary Cassatt often modeled for her friend Edgar Degas in a series of pictures showing women trying on what?
Hats
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.
Q 04In 1966, Mary Cassatt's painting The Boating Party was reproduced on which everyday American item?
A postage stamp
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.
Q 05A 1910 trip to which country left Mary Cassatt feeling crushed by the strength of its ancient art?
Egypt
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.
Q 06Mary Cassatt, celebrated for painting mothers and children, decided early in life that what would clash with her career?
Marriage
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.
Q 07Mary Cassatt's older brother Alexander, more famous in America than she was, rose to lead a company in which industry?
Railroads
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.
Q 08A big 1890 Paris exhibition of prints from which country inspired Mary Cassatt's celebrated series of color prints?
Japan
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.
Q 09Mary Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, a Pennsylvania town that is now part of which larger city?
Pittsburgh
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.
Q 10Which eye condition, diagnosed in her late sixties, left Mary Cassatt nearly blind and ended her painting?
Cataracts
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.
Q 11In which Paris museum did the young Mary Cassatt spend her days copying old masters with an official permit?
The Louvre
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.
Q 12After the 1879 Impressionist show made a profit, Mary Cassatt spent her share on works by Degas and which painter?
Claude Monet
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.
Q 13In Mary Cassatt's 1878 painting In the Loge, a woman ignores a man staring at her while she looks through what?
Q 21Which French painter was already the Impressionist group's one female member when Mary Cassatt was invited to join?
Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot became Cassatt's friend and colleague, and a French critic later named both of them among the three great ladies of Impressionism.
Q 22Which official Paris art exhibition rejected both of Mary Cassatt's 1877 entries, shortly before Degas recruited her?
The Salon
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.
Q 23Which European war was just starting when Mary Cassatt returned from Europe to the United States in the summer of 1870?
Opera glasses
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.
Q 14Which award, created by Napoleon, did France give Mary Cassatt in 1904 for her contributions to the arts?
Legion of Honor
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.
Q 15Mary Cassatt showed eighteen works in a 1915 New York exhibition organized to raise money for which cause?
Women's suffrage
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.
Q 16Which sister of Mary Cassatt shared her Paris home and posed for many paintings until dying in 1882?
Lydia
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.
Q 17In which American city did a teenage Mary Cassatt enroll at an academy of fine arts against her family's wishes?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 18A dancer in a lace mantilla was among the local subjects Mary Cassatt painted in 1873 while staying in which country?
Spain
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.
Q 19A relative disliked Mary Cassatt's portrait Lady at the Tea Table because she thought which feature looked too big?
The nose
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.
Q 20During World War II, the name Mary Cassatt was given to which kind of American vessel, built in 1943?
Liberty ship
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.
Franco-Prussian War
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.
Q 24Which language did Mary Cassatt learn alongside French as a child, when her family spent several years in Europe?
German
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.
Q 25Mary Cassatt fumed that the jury rejecting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair in 1878 included a member of which profession?
A pharmacist
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.
Q 26In Mary Cassatt's Modern Woman mural for the 1893 World's Fair, young women pluck fruit that stands for what?
Knowledge
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.
Q 27Mary Cassatt advised the Havemeyers, whose vast Impressionist collection largely went to which New York institution?
Metropolitan Museum of Art
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.
Q 28Mary Cassatt painted The Boating Party while wintering at Antibes, a French resort town on which body of water?
The Mediterranean
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.
Q 29Which Washington, D.C. museum owns Mary Cassatt's The Boating Party and Little Girl in a Blue Armchair?
National Gallery of Art
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.
Q 30Which famous Paris art school was closed to Mary Cassatt in 1866 because it did not yet admit women?
École des Beaux-Arts
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.