Other Works of Art

This work contains Mary's usual subject matter: mothers and their children. It is pastel on wove paper, and it was done in 1901. As you can tell from the title of the piece, the little blonde girl on the right side of the picture is named Sara.

Mary Cassatt- The Artist

Mary was an impressionist. Her most common subjects were women in private and social situations. She specifically focused on the bond between a mother and her child. Usually, mothers were painted together with their young children. Men almost never make appearances in Cassat's work. In fact, the man in The Boating Party is one of the first men she ever painted. She wanted to try painting a man to show that she could paint more than just women and children. She wanted to show off her skill set.

Mary Stevenson Cassatt: The Beginning

Mary Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Her father was a high-end real estate and investment broker, and so her family had a high social standing. Her classes at school, such as homemaking, embroidery, music, sketching, and painting, were meant to prepare her to be a proper wife, but evidentally, she chose another path. Mary enrolled in Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when she was 16. Since women weren't encouraged to pursue careers at this time, he male classmates and teachers weren't very kind to her. She also found that the curriculum was too slow paced and inadequate for her liking, so she left the school and moved to Europe, where she had lived for a few years as a young girl, to study the work of the Old Masters on her own, firsthand. She left for Paris in 1866 against her parents wishes. She studied at the privately at the Louvre, until 1868, when a portrait of hers was selected at the Paris Salon, an annual exhibition run by the French government. She submitted the piece under the name Mary Stevenson. 

Info from: http://www.biography.com/people/mary-cassatt-9240820

The Boating Party by Mary Cassatt

The Painting

The Boating Party was painted between the years of 1893-1894. It is an oil on canvas painting in the Chester Dale Collection. It's dimensions are 35 7/16 x 46 1/8 inches, or 90 x 117.3 cm. The artist, Mary Cassatt, painted this piece while on the south coast of France. It was the center-piece of her first solo show in the United States, and was a very unusual piece for her artistic style because of its coloring, complex composition, and subject matter. Cassat usually just painted women and children, and so adding a man to that mix was an attempt at new compositional effects.