Mary Cassatt Research Paper

An influential American printmaker and painter as she was known for impressionist style in the 1880s, which reflected her ideas of the modern women and created artwork that displayed the maternal embrace between women and children; Mary Cassatt was truly the renowned artist in the 19th century. Cassatt exhibited her work regularly in Pennsylvania where she was born and raised in 1844. However, she spent most of her life in France where she was discovered by her mentor Edgar Degas who was the very person that gave her the opportunity that soon made one of the only American female Impressionist in Paris. An exhibition of Japanese woodblock Cassatt attends in Paris inspired her as she took upon creating a piece called, “Maternal Caress” (1890-91), a print of mother captured in a tender moment where she caress her child in an experimental dry-point etching by the same artist who never bared a child her entire life. Cassatt began to specialize in the portrayal of children with mother and was considered to be one of the greatest interpreters in the late 1800s.
Moreover, Cassatt was raised in Philadelphia and began taking classes in Fine Art

She combined her own skills with the symbolism of a mother and child theme and with flattened oriented aesthetics which resulted in one of her prints called “Maternal Caress”. Cassatt has bought Japanese prints by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) and displayed them in her home alongside her own work. Cassatt awareness was of the Japanese aesthetics was clearly shown in the same kind of print by Utamaro, “Midnight: Mother and Sleepy Child.”. Cassatt portrayal of women and children together depicted a women’s true form but also implied to the sexual life not through sexuality but through the nineteenth century socially accepted emphasis on