Among these pioneers were young men and women who would come to study art in Paris, including George P. Cassatt was from a proper and prosperous Pennsylvania family who could afford to travel through Europe.
After studying art in Philadelphia, she told her father that she wanted to study art abroad. She would succeed in having her first painting accepted to the Paris Salon in According to McCullough:. Cassatt would decide to live in Paris in , and thereafter make France her home for the rest of her life. Nothing to do with Cassatt. I obviously live in a bubble of art history and assume the rest of the world does too.
At about this same time, Degas invited Cassatt to join the Impressionists, the first and only American in the group, and only the second woman besides Berthe Morisot. Cassatt would join in their Fourth Impressionist Exhibit in It was a good fit for Cassatt, who despite her thoroughly conventional background, had an independent and blunt personality. She was not well suited for the politics and brown-nosing required to fit in the Paris art establishment:. Finally I could work with absolute independence without concern for the eventual opinion of the jury.
I detested conventional art and I began to live. Once her parents moved to Paris, Cassatt turned her focus toward domestic family portraits of her mother, sister, nieces and nephews. Her portraits would not be highly flattering society portraits, but rather, beautiful studies in composition and mood. Her women would be introspective and intellectual, utterly without pretense, often concentrating on a task, a newspaper or a book. Displayed in Fourth Impressionist Exhibit in Cassatt may suffer from a modern feminist bias against highly domestic scenes with women and children, as if Cassatt agreed that this was the only proper sphere for women.
In fact, Cassatt was a highly ambitious artist who never married and who was responsible for earning her own living. She did. However, she did enjoy going to the opera about four times a week in the company of close friends and family.
