Cassatt has to remind people continually that she is a professional artist and this is her career.

There is no question that Cassatt’s been undervalued as a bold, modernist pioneer.

I think when we think of her today, there’s a little bit of a sentimentality to the way that we imagine her work.

Her work was actually tough and radical.

If you are familiar with Cassatt, you might be most familiar with her images of women and children.

Just at the moment that her peers Cézanne or Monet are taking up the Japanese footbridge or Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Cassatt seems to be saying the sphere of women and children is equally worthy.

She deserves to be known as a rule breaker, someone who experimented wildly with her materials to arrive at images unlike any we had seen before.

Mary Cassatt destroyed all correspondence that individuals wrote to her.

So what we have are letters that she wrote to family, to friends, essentially letters that are scattered in collections around the world.

She was a very private individual, and she makes, I think, a very powerful and important statement that, “What one would like to leave behind one is superior art and a hidden personality.”

Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania.

Her father was a successful stockbroker. Her mother was the daughter of a banker.

Cassatt goes to school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

She actually put her name down on the class list at age 15.

You weren’t allowed to attend classes until you were 16, but that gives us a sense of how eager she was.

Plenty of young ladies learned to paint as a sort of genteel accomplishment, but she was interested in a different path.

As Cassatt’s pursuing her artistic training she’s consistently sending her paintings to exhibition, either in Philadelphia or New York, but also at the same time, to Paris.

It was a significant center, if not the center of the art world.

It was sort of essential for all artists to kind of pass through Paris and show their work.

In 1874, it becomes her home for the rest of her life.

Within a couple of years, she is introduced to a number of the Impressionists.

Cassatt is invited to exhibit with the group by Edgar Degas, who was one of the founding members of the Impressionists and quickly becomes one of her very closest friends and collaborators.

Within the kind of Impressionist project, she turns an eye especially to women and to female subjects.

Cassatt makes her debut with the Impressionist group in 1879.

Degas shows a lot of his famous pictures of ballerinas.

Cassatt, too, chooses to set a great number of her submissions to that exhibition in the spaces of Parisian theaters, focusing not on the stage but on the audience, on women of her own social class and background in their sort of native habitat of these velvet-lined boxes.

Cassatt painted what was accessible to her.

She was mindful of coming from a wealthy family, and that meant that certain subjects were really off limits to her.

She couldn’t paint bars.

It probably would have been extremely difficult for her to find her way into factories.

She’s painting the well-to-do world of Paris.

Yet within that, she has a particular eye for what it might be like to be a woman in that world.

We have this really amazing depiction of a woman at a matinee performance, you know, buttoned up, wearing a bonnet, and intent on something that she’s looking at through her opera glasses that we don’t get to see.

There’s a gent whom we glimpse in the background behind her, with his own set of opera glasses, apparently looking quite carefully at her.

Whether she’s ignoring him or unaware of him, we’re left to conjecture, but it’s definitely an image of a woman who is intent on seeing the world for herself.

In Driving, Cassatt hasn’t chosen to show a woman being driven around the parks of Paris, but a woman at the reins doing the driving of this carriage.

The horse groom isn’t doing any of the work here. He’s along for the ride.

He looks a little grumpy. He’s not sure of his place.

I think it’s a quite telling description of a moment where a woman had a great deal of autonomy and independence.

Cassatt turns to caretaking as a major theme in her work.

She quickly recognizes that this is a fresh subject.

Yes, of course, the Western tradition is full of representations of, say, the Madonna and Child, but is not full of images of acts of taking care.

So this is actually a quite new modern area to explore.

In The Child’s Bath, we see a woman who has a child on her lap.

It seems like it might either fall asleep or start crying at any moment.

Cassatt’s attention to the woman’s hand is quite striking.

That hand is depicted with so much attention.

This is a reddened hand that has probably done quite a bit of work.

That throws a kind of different light onto the work of bathing a child.

In this particular pastel, A Kiss for Baby Ann, we see really carefully worked areas in the faces of the woman and child.

And then by the time we get out to the edges of the sheet, it’s just sort of scattered strokes of color.

I think that contrast is all about inviting us into her process, giving us a chance essentially to look over her shoulder as she paints these pictures.

In 1889, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, there’s a massive exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints and from Cassatt’s letters we know that she attends this exhibition over and over again, and she even describes just how enamored she is by the colors, the techniques, the patterns.

And coming out of the exhibition, she writes a famous letter to her friend and Impressionist colleague Berthe Morisot saying, “I’m dreaming of color on copper.”

So the Japanese prints that she had seen were made using a sequence of woodblock plates, each inked with a different color.

And she sets out essentially to reverse engineer that process using Western intaglio techniques on copper plates.

She pioneers a method within etching and aquatint, or within the world of intaglio printmaking that she is really skillful at already.

We realized that we knew very little about how Cassatt actually worked, or even her methods and her materials and techniques.

Through our paper conservator Christina Taylor, we worked to reproduce step-by-step The Letter, which is one of the prints in the “Set of Ten.”

And it was through that process that we really got inside of Cassatt’s techniques and really tried to understand exactly how she did what she did.

We feel like we’ve gotten really close to the bottom of how complex and advanced the methods are, but there’s still a bit of mystery left.

Cassatt paints her last pictures in the early 1910s, and in many ways, her practice as a painter culminates or finishes with an exhibition that she helps to organize in New York in 1915 to benefit the cause of women’s suffrage.

It also includes a number of works by Degas, who did not believe in women’s suffrage.

I just find it very pleasing that she slips his work in there in this show to benefit a cause that she believed in quite ardently, and he not so much.

Cassatt from the beginning had her sights on becoming a well-known, well-recognized professional artist.

She in many ways lived a life of contrasts.

She was an American, but she lived and pursued most of her career and life in France.

She never married or had children of her own, and yet she devotes a lot of her career to depicting this subject.

I think this exhibition helps us reconsider some of those stereotypes, helps us think about just how radical her technical procedures were, and in fact, how new and daring her subject matter often was as well.

Cassatt dared to take the lives of women seriously as a subject for great art.