American Art Collaborative

Mary Cassatt, the daughter of a wealthy Pennsylvania banker, traveled extensively through Italy, Belgium and Spain and trained in Paris with several notable teachers including Gérôme and Couture. She met Degas in 1877, and though their friendship would be fitful and end in total estrangement, the encounter proved meaningful for both artists. Under Degas' influence, Cassatt's early, earthy realist style gave way to a more impressionistic approach. He in turn, recruited a sympathetic artisan for his realist faction of Impressionism. Like Degas, Cassatt explored various techniques, including pastels and graphics. She also shared his abiding interest in Japanese art. Excluded from many of her male colleagues' haunts, Cassatt appropriated as her specialty images of upper-class women and children. Characteristic of her later work is this pastel, "Margot in Blue," showing a child wearing a floppy white bonnet and blue dress.