Explore a feminist reading of Mary Cassatt's work

What made Mary Cassatt's art radical

Although the American Impressionist's work is sometimes dismissed as overly sentimental, these Cassatt specialists argue that her portrayals of women are often subtly subversive, emphasizing how they defy the gender norms of the time.

Explore a timeline of Mary Cassatt's career

This collection from The Art Story situates Cassatt's major works chronologically and provides historical context, allowing you to see how her interactions with both the French Impressionists and Japanese printmaking influenced her work.

Mary Cassatt carved space for women in the Impressionist movement

The painter was one of three women to exhibit with the French artists, and the only American. Cassatt broke ground by focusing on subjects largely ignored by the male-dominated art world, such as maternity and womanhood.

See a collection of Mary Cassatt's artwork

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's digital collection includes 15 of Cassatt's works, including several iconic watercolors, like "Portrait of the Artist" and "Mother Playing with Child." Alongside them, you can read helpful contextual information assembled by Cassatt scholar H Barbara Weinberg.

Scholars note that many Cassatt paintings are about women's labor

The women in her portraits are often performing domestic work, something that contemporary scholars consider a subtle protest of how women's labor was often overlooked during Cassatt's time. Fittingly, Cassatt often hired working-class women as models, ensuring the portraits were not only accurate but that the subjects were appropriately compensated.

One Mary Cassatt painting features a sly political message

Critics had long been puzzled by the unrealistic flower pinned to the woman's chest in the 1905 painting "Mother and Child." In exploring the painting's history, researcher Nikki Georgopulos discovered that the flower alluded to a women's suffrage badge popular at the time, something Cassatt emphasized in the painting's original title, "Woman With a Sunflower."

Hear a quick but insightful analysis of Mary Cassatt's 'The Boating Party'

Karen Jackson travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to study an oil painting from 1893, walking listeners through a close reading of the canvas. Even if you can't make it to the museum, you can pull the image up and follow her guided analysis.

How Cassatt's early life influenced her art

The painter came from an affluent background but was determined to become an artist, a decision that was at odds with her father's wishes. Still, she began art school at 15, where she was one of the few female students and not permitted to paint portraits of live models. This brief documentary from The Art Tourist explains how those formative experiences taught Cassatt to challenge conventional approaches in her work.

Explore Mary Cassatt's colorful 'Set of 10' prints, inspired by her interest in Japanese woodblocking.

How Cassatt experimented with the then-new medium of pastels

Cassatt is primarily noted for her paintings and prints, though she also experimented with pastels, a novel medium for the 19th century. Art scholar Marjorie Shelley walks through one of Cassatt's pastel works with a close analysis of 1914's "Mother and Child."

Comparing the impressionism of Monet and Cassatt

Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt were both Impressionists, but that's not all they had in common. This quick comparative analysis of Monet's "The Beach at Trouville" and Cassatt's "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair" shows how both paintings subtly comment on the class of their subjects.

Mary Cassatt's 'The Child's Bath' was a rare sight for 19th-century art

Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker note that this portrait of an intimate moment between mother and daughter might have been out of place in 1893, but that its subject matter alludes to spiritual images from the Renaissance or Baroque periods.

2 art historians break down Mary Cassatt's 'Little Girl in a Blue Armchair'

Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris analyze Cassatt's 1878 painting, highlighting how the perspective places viewers on the same level as the child portrayed and how this affects our impression of the little girl.

Cassatt painted more than just mothers and daughters

In one 1884 portrait, she captured her brother, Alexander Cassatt, and her nephew during a family holiday. The image is just as tender as her paintings of mothers and daughters, with the father and son—their faces near mirror images—in an intimate embrace.

Mary Cassatt's sister, Lydia, moved to Paris to manage her household so Mary could focus on her painting, a dynamic that inadvertently turned Lydia into her sister's muse.

How Mary Cassatt pioneered printmaking

In 1890, the artist attended an exhibition in Paris featuring a vast collection of 725 Japanese woodblock prints. Inspired by the work, she told a friend she could not stop thinking about "color on copper," and eventually used a metal plate "intaglio" technique to execute her vision. This video recreates how she made it happen.

Mary Cassatt helped establish the Impressionists' legacy in the US by persuading wealthy patrons to collect their work.

Cassatt participated in a fundraiser for women's suffrage against her family's wishes.

Mary Cassatt was not a fan of Mother's Day

When Mother's Day was first proposed as a holiday in 1913, the American Impressionist opposed it, believing that women's suffrage was a far more important issue. The holiday was established by an act of Congress in 1915; Congress did not pass the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, until 1919.

Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas both influenced each other's work and challenged one another to try new techniques in their painting, though their relationship eventually soured for unclear reasons.

Listen to 3 scholars discuss the work of Emily Dickinson

Fiona Green, Linda Freedman, and Paraic Finnerty—three British academics who study Dickinson—discuss the poet's life, distinctive writing style, and impact on the generations who followed, illustrating that part of Dickinson's appeal lies in her open-ended verse, which invites readers' many interpretations.

The impressionist painters—the 19th-century group that included Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, and more—got their name from a critic who used the term in a negative review, claiming they were unable to paint more realistic scenes.

Explore works by essential female pop artists

Like so many art movements, the pantheon of pop art was mostly men, despite the contributions of several important women artists to its aesthetics and history. See paintings from British pop founder Pauline Boty and several artists who worked with, or exhibited alongside, the likes of Warhol and Haring.

Why Emily Dickinson's poetry remains popular in the 21st century

Dickinson remains widely read and is often considered one of American literature's greatest poets. This short documentary from PBS uses a 2017 museum exhibition on the writer to explore her long-lasting impact, with input from Barbara Howe, a contemporary poet, and Marta Werner, a Dickinson scholar.

Explore the annotated cover of the inaugural issue of Ms., the feminist magazine cofounded by Gloria Steinem.

O’Keeffe discredited sexual interpretations of her flower paintings

In 1943, the artist famously explained her intention to call attention to flowers by making them large and detailed. O’Keeffe added that while she wanted people to notice her flowers, they ended up projecting their own associations that didn’t reflect her own ideas.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 'Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette' is considered an impressionist masterpiece that captures the fleeting moments of working-class people at a beer hall.

Exploring the work of Frances Burney, one of Jane Austen's main influences

Jane Austen is often credited with pioneering the narrative technique of "free indirect discourse," in which a narrator embodies a character's style without using the first-person perspective. But this essay argues Burney is the real innovator and that Austen, a fan of Burney's, continued using the technique to more acclaim.

Works of art on motherhood at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City contains one of the world's most prestigious collections, and this page draws together classic and contemporary works created around the theme of motherhood.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect.

Debunking the myth of Dickinson's antisocial seclusion

It's true that the poet largely kept to herself in her late-30s, spending nearly all her time at her father's house, and when she did venture out into the world, she'd wear white, facts that led American history to label her a strange, antisocial recluse. But, as this essay shows, that image is not entirely true, evident in the many relationships she maintained through her letters.

O’Keeffe was part of a movement of American artists changing previous norms

One of the most recognizable names of the American modernism movement from the early 1900s, O’Keeffe’s portrayals of nature strayed from realism and prioritized emotional truth, using elements like bold colors and abstract shapes to capture the feeling of observing her subjects.

Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' is seen as the start of cubism

The 1907 work rejects many of the art world norms of the time, like linear perspective and realistic depictions of light. Picasso's painting also nods to African masks, demonstrating a willingness to indulge in styles outside the Western canon.

Why art history is filled with miserable brides

Paintings from the 19th century are filled with unhappy brides. The women are often visibly disturbed by their pending nuptials, sometimes even during the wedding ceremony. This Artnet article unpacks four famous examples of this trend, analyzing how and why the respective artists portrayed these disappointed figures.

Mary Cassatt created a massive mural titled "Modern Woman" for the 1893 World's Fair, but it mysteriously disappeared after the fair ended and hasn't been found since.

An artist used forensic techniques to recreate Jane Austen's face

For over two centuries, there was only one accepted portrait of the writer—an 1810 sketch done by Cassandra Austen, Jane's sister. Artist Melissa Dring used that as a basis for her waxwork of the author, along with eyewitness accounts from people who'd met the writer.

Jane Austen used satire to critique women's place in society

Although the novelist is sometimes dismissed as a romance writer, her stories feature pointed societal critiques, especially of women's limited options and challenged popular notions that women were subservient and passive.

Take a virtual tour of Gloria Steinem's Manhattan apartment, a hub for feminist activism in the 1960s and '70s.