Editing Mary Cassatt (section)

== Paris and Impressionism ==

Cassatt moved to Paris in 1866 to study art privately, as French academic institutions also restricted women's access to formal training. She studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme and other established painters, exhibiting at the Salon while developing her technical abilities. Her early work demonstrated solid academic training, but she found the Salon's conservative aesthetic increasingly confining. The encounter with Edgar Degas's work in 1875 proved transformative—his innovative compositions and modern subjects aligned with her own developing interests.<ref name="pollock"/>

Degas invited Cassatt to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1877, beginning an artistic and personal relationship that would shape both artists' careers. As the only American and one of only three women regularly exhibiting with the group, Cassatt brought her own perspective to Impressionist practice, focusing on domestic scenes that her male colleagues rarely explored. Her paintings of mothers and children, women at tea, and figures at the opera combined Impressionist color and light with psychological depth that distinguished her work from more superficial treatments of similar subjects.<ref name="mathews"/>