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When she was born
Mary Cassatt was born in on May 22, 1844, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. She was one of the leading artists in the Impressionist movement of the later part of the 1800s. -
He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts
Her schooling prepared her to be a proper wife and mother and included such classes as homemaking, embroidery, music, sketching and painting. Mary Cassatt enrolled in Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at age 16. She decided to leave the program and move to Europe where she could study the works of the Old Masters on her own, firsthand. -
She studied at the Louvre
Mary Cassatt left for Paris in 1866. She began her studying with private art lessons in the Louvre, where she would study and copy masterpieces. -
His first painting exposed
She continued to study and paint in relative obscurity until 1868, when one of her portraits was selected at the prestigious Paris Salon, an annual exhibition run by the French government. With her father's disapproving words echoing in her ears, Cassatt submitted the well-received painting under the name Mary Stevenson. -
He came back to his house
In 1870, soon after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Mary Cassatt reluctantly returned home to live with her parents. Not only did she have trouble finding proper supplies, but her father refused to pay for anything connected with her art. To raise funds, she tried to sell some of her paintings in New York, but to no avail. Her art was not accepted because she used to paint the daily life of common women. -
His paintings burned
When she tried again to sell them through a dealer in Chicago, the paintings were tragically destroyed in a fire in 1871. -
He became a status as an artist
The Paris Salon accepted her paintings for exhibitions in 1872, 1873 and 1874, which helped secure her status as an established artist. She continued to study and paint in Spain, Belgium and Rome, eventually settling permanently in Paris. -
She lost his vision and died
She was forced to give up painting altogether as diabetes slowly stole her vision. For the next 11 years, until her death—on June 14, 1926, in Le Mesnil-Théribus, France—Mary Cassatt lived in almost total blindness, bitterly unhappy to be robbed of her greatest source of pleasure.
