For over a century, Mary Cassatt's work has been portrayed primarily through images of mothers, children, and domestic interiors, which have made her work instantly recognizable. The Musée d'Orsay, however, seeks to shift the focus to the artistic, professional, and personal autonomy that spanned her entire career. Organized on the centenary of the artist's death, the exhibition represents a historic event for France: no French national museum has previously dedicated a retrospective of this scope to Cassatt, despite her central role within the Impressionist group. The project brings together approximately eighty works from European and American collections, including pieces rarely exhibited outside the United States. Born in Pennsylvania in 1844, Cassatt moved to Europe at a young age, choosing Paris as the center of her education and artistic career. In a male-dominated environment, she managed to establish an independent position thanks in part to her relationship with Edgar Degas, who invited her to participate in Impressionist exhibitions starting in 1879. Although she frequently worked on women's everyday life, Cassatt avoided sentimental or decorative depictions. Her female figures often appear focused, autonomous, immersed in private spaces that never become voyeuristic scenes. Even her famous images of mothers and children take on a psychological tension and compositional construction that distance them from the conventional domestic painting of the time. The exhibition offers a reinterpretation of modernity through one of the few artists who managed to occupy a central position in the Parisian art scene between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
