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.

Happy birthday, financier J.P. Morgan

It is the birthday of financier J.P. Morgan (1837), who was one of the richest and powerful men in America in the era of the Robber Barons. He supplied gold to the U.S. Treasury to end the Panic of 1896. He personally averted the banking Panic of 1907 by locking financial leaders in his New York mansion until they agreed to solutions to the problem. He merged companies to form General Electric and U.S. Steel. He underwrote the rescue of The New York Times from financial disaster. Morgan was an avid collector of art, books and gemstones. He contributed to the American Museum of Natural History and helped start the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His private collection formed the foundation of the Pierpont Morgan Library.