Happy Birthday, Mary Cassatt

Did you know? Today is the birthday of one of my favorite artists, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), an American Impressionist who exhibited in Paris at the original Impressionist shows, and was a close friend of Edgar Degas. She influenced many prominent American Industrialists to collect Impressionist art, which is one reason Impressionism is well represented in American museums today. Cassatt suffered from cataracts, and probably diabetic eye disease, and stopped painting entirely during the later years of her life. If you compare her later paintings with her earlier ones, the later ones suffer greatly from coarseness and lack of detail, which is why she stopped painting.

(self-portrait, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons and Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Did you also know? The San Diego Museum of Art has a lovely Cassatt work, Simone in a Blue Bonnett.