You would be forgiven for assuming, as I admittedly did until quite recently, that the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt was French. After all, she spent most of her life in Paris, where she fell in with a group of pioneering French artists whom she often referred to as “our set” — Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and her close friend Edgar Degas among them. In 1894, she was named by art critic Henri Focillon as one of “Les Trois Grandes Dames” (“The Three Great Ladies”) of Impressionism, along with the French painters Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond. But the Pittsburgh-born Cassatt — who moved to France in 1874 at the age of 30 and spent the rest of her life there — was forever an American in Paris, argues Ruth E. Iskin in her new book Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy.
“I am an American, clearly and frankly American,” Cassatt told her first biographer after having lived in France for nearly four decades. Though she rarely returned stateside, making only three trips home in 52 years, Cassatt was no expat. She was a staunch supporter of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and worked closely with American collectors to fulfill her lifelong mission to bring contemporary French art to the nation’s burgeoning museums. Iskin, then, sees Cassatt as a distinctly transatlantic artist, whose strong identification with the US and prominence in the French art world were deeply entwined.
In this meticulously researched and rigorously argued book, Iken depicts her subject as an ambitious and savvy woman who, despite societal constraints, exercised remarkable agency over her trajectory. In her early 20s, she dared to leave the security of her upper-middle-class family home to pursue an artistic education in Europe. Her move to Paris was strategic: The city provided unparalleled opportunities to share her work, find patronage, and make connections. Cassatt would become the only American to exhibit with the Impressionists — which Iskin argues was the result of the artist’s “explicit networking” and not her “chance discovery” by Degas, as some scholars claim. She also stresses that Cassatt was Degas’s peer, not his protégé. Despite Degas’s virulent misogyny, even he couldn’t help but admire Cassatt’s work, expressing particular reverence for her tender 1899 painting “The Oval Mirror (Mother and Child),” which evokes Rennaisance images of the Virgin and Child.
Of particular interest to Iskin is Cassatt’s friendship with the New York art collector and suffragist Louisine Havemeyer — a bond that proved consequential for both American museums and politics, not to mention was the “closest, longest, and most important” of Cassatt’s life. Iskin meticulously mines the two women’s correspondence, much of it unpublished. From Paris, Cassatt helped Havemeyer assemble an exceptional collection of Impressionist art, which she bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929. And at Cassatt’s urging, Havemeyer became a leading activist for women’s suffrage, cofounding the National Women’s Party in 1913 and staging major protests.
Cassatt, too, was an early feminist whose politics were central to her art, which challenged perceptions of older women and emphasized women’s roles as mentors and educators. Though she never married or had children, choosing to devote her life to art, Cassatt has become overwhelmingly associated with her depictions of domesticity, which make up just one part of her oeuvre. Iskin highlights the cosmopolitan sensibility that also runs through much of her work: In a rare self-portrait, for instance, painted in 1878 just before Cassatt’s first exhibition with the Impressionist group, the artist depicts herself as a pensive, self-possessed woman whose confident body language and “outdoors” attire signal that “she belongs to the metropolis.” But Iskin sidesteps hagiography to depict a complicated figure: As a young woman, for instance, Cassatt declared that she “wanted to paint better than the old masters”; later in life, in a letter to art critic Roger Marx, she doubted whether women could be great artists.
Yet, whether or not she thought it possible, Cassatt herself was a great artist. On that front, Iskin leaves no room for doubt. She injects fresh perspective and important nuance into Cassatt’s legacy, while affirming her singular place in art history: as a prominent Impressionist, a trailblazing woman artist, and an American Parisian whose influence spanned an ocean.
Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy (2025) by Ruth E. Iskin is published by the University of California Press and is available online and through independent booksellers.
