Mary Cassatt at Work
Philadelphia Museum of Art
May 18 – September 8, 2024
Lydia Seated in the Garden with a Dog on Her Lap, 1878–79
Oil on canvas, 10 3/4 × 16 in. (27.3 × 40.6 cm)
Cathy Lasry, New York
A Goodnight Hug, 1880
Pastel on brown paper laid down on board,
16 9/16 x 24 3/4 in. (42 x 62.8 cm)
Driving, 1881
Oil on canvas, 35 5/16 × 51 3/8 in. (89.7 × 130.5 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art:
Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, W1921-1-1
Woman at Her Toilette, c. 1891
Oil on canvas, approx. 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm)
Private Collection
The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Mary Cassatt at Work, the first large-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in the U.S. in a quarter century.
Pennsylvania-born and a celebrated member of the French Impressionists, Mary Cassatt built a groundbreaking career through hard work and artistic vision. For six decades, Cassatt was a committed, professional artist, making the social, intellectual, and working lives of modern women a core subject of her prints, paintings, and pastels. She once wrote: “Oh the dignity of work, give me the chance of earning my own living, five francs a day and self-respect.”
Mary Cassatt at Work presents over 130 of her works in various media to show her evolving practice as an artist and demonstrate her commitment to the “serious work” of artmaking. It presents new findings about her materials and working methods—which were advanced and radical for her era—based on detailed technical studies of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s significant Cassatt holdings.
“Art was Mary Cassatt’s life’s purpose and living,” said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This exhibition will focus on Cassatt’s professionalism, her biography, and the wider Parisian world she inhabited. It’s my hope that this exhibition will reshape contemporary conversations about gender, work, and artistic agency.”
Mary Cassatt at Work features works from the PMA’s extensive collection, including some of Cassatt’s most celebrated paintings and prints, as well as loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Viginia Museum of Fine Arts, and private collections.
“We hope visitors come away with a sense of who Cassatt was and how carefully she constructed her identity as a working artist,” said curators Jennifer A. Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, and Laurel Garber, The Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings. “With this exhibition, we’ve sought to reexamine the full breadth of Cassatt’s art through the lens of her creative enterprise and draw attention to her commitment to ceaseless experimentation and bold techniques."
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
Following its run at the PMA, this exhibition will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor.
PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART - PMA
2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130
