Celebrating Motherhood Through Art: Mary Cassatt

Mother's Day is a day to celebrate mothers of all kinds around the world. When I think of motherhood portrayed through art, I cannot help but be reminded instantly of Mary Cassatt.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She spent her early years with her family in France and Germany. From 1860 to 1862, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and by 1865 she convinced her parents to let her study in Paris, where she took private lessons from leading academic painter JJean-Léon Gérômeean.

She honed her skills and practiced by copying the works and techniques of the old masters and spent her time sketching. She funded her studies and travels in Europe with portrait commissions painted in oils in her early career. In 1868, her painting The Mandolin Player was accepted at the Paris Salon and was the first time her work was represented there.
Mary was an astounding impressionistic artist who created a unique style that differentiated her from other artists. While she began her astonishing art career with oils, it was later in life that she discovered her love of watercolors, gouache, and pastels.

With these new mediums, she experimented with various techniques such as drawing, painting, drypoint etching, aquating, and monotype printing. Mary created hundreds of fascinating portraits that helped her hone her one-of-a-kind style that is still easily recognizable today.

Mary was passionate and enchanted with observing people during their day-to-day lives, capturing simple and ordinary moments of family, friends, and neighbors. These portraits remained candid, yet Mary remained respectful and careful not to trespass into their lives, ensuring she did not disrupt their daily routines.

Mary's primary subjects were women and children during the latter part of her painting and life. She immortalized the extraordinary bond between mothers and children, evoking emotion with every brush stroke. Mary did not have children of her own, and perhaps painting was her way of expressing both the longing and admiration for motherhood and all that it entails, and it may also have been a means of personal therapy for her. We can only speculate why, as no one knows for sure—yet it seems to anyone who gazes upon her paintings that Mary intimately understood and experienced motherhood through her artwork, expressing the love of child and parent in beautiful color.

It is amazing what we as artists can do and the emotions we can inspire within those who see our art. We live our dreams and experiences through each pencil line, brush stroke, and palette knife. Mary is remembered as one of the greatest portrait painters of her time, not just for her technical work or face but also for the emotions and meanings she captured.
I hope that you will take some time this day to enjoy the artwork of Mary Cassatt and many amazing mothers of art as they depict and capture the joys of motherhood, and perhaps you, too, will be inspired to create your next stunning piece.

Check out the Mary Cassatt website to see her complete collection and a thorough biography of this extraordinarily talented painter. And I wish you the happiest of Mother's Days!