ABSTRACT
The career of Mary Cassatt is one of the most remarkable in the history of American art. Born in 1844 in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, she was taken as a child to live in Paris, Heidelberg, and Darmstadt. Her parents were amateurs of French culture, her father a businessman who could never really get interested in making a fortune. In 1858 the Cassatt family returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, and by 1860 Mary Cassatt—at the age of sixteen—was already determined to be an artist. Degas characterized one of the pictures as "little Jesus with his English governess," and his remark sums up a great deal of what still troubles us about this aspect of Cassatt's work. In the biography of Mary Cassatt that Frederick A. Sweet published in 1966, he wrote that she "was not a very inventive painter and could prosper only when she was surrounded by strong influences".
