Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) was born on 22 May 1844 in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, into a prominent banking family, one of seven children. She spent part of her childhood in Europe, then studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In the mid-1860s she moved to Paris and worked with the painters Thomas Couture, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Charles Chaplin. Her first major showing was at the Paris Salon of 1872, and she settled permanently in France in 1874.
Edgar Degas saw her work and invited her to join the Impressionists. She was the only American in the group, and exhibited with them in 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886, helping to organise their shows. Like Degas, she preferred unposed, asymmetrical compositions, and she drew superbly. She worked boldly in pastel, and with Degas and Camille Pissarro she experimented with new colour printmaking techniques. Her best-known subject is the quiet intimacy between mothers and small children, as in The Child’s Bath of 1893.
Cassatt also urged wealthy American friends, above all the Havemeyer family, to buy Impressionist paintings, and in this way shaped American taste as much as through her own work. From 1894 she divided her time between Paris and the Château de Beaufresne at Le Mesnil-Théribus. Failing eyesight forced her to stop making art in 1914. She died at Beaufresne on 14 June 1926, aged eighty-two.