Mary Cassatt makes a great impression

It is the birthday of painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt (1844), a leading artist of the Impressionist period in Paris and a friend and benefactor of Edgar Degas. She exhibited with the Impressionists and also at the Paris Salon. As a teenager, she overcame her father’s strenuous objection and studied in France, her mother along as a chaperone. As a young woman, she was commissioned to copy two paintings by Correggio in Italy for the Catholic Archdiocese of Pittsburgh. Later, in Paris, she helped wealthy friends collect Impressionists’ works, collections now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cassatt’s work can be seen in museums around the world, and is still in demand by private collectors. Her painting, In the Box, once brought a price of $4.072 million at auction.