Mary Cassatt Drypoint

As one of just two females and the only American member of the original French Impressionist circle, Mary Cassatt stands out for her ability to capture scenes of domestic life in her paintings that her male contemporaries often did not encounter. 

Where other Impressionists indulged in sensual or sensational scenes of Parisian women, Cassatt’s unique perspective allowed her to create intimate, true-to-life renderings of her subjects. She pushed the radical art movement further to capture tender, fleeting instants shared by women as mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. Between 1860 and 1865, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and in December 1865, she sailed to Paris to study with the French painters Charles Chaplin and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

In 1868, Cassatt made her debut at the Paris Salon but returned to Philadelphia in 1870 with the onset of the Franco-Prussian war. However, by 1874 she had settled again in Paris, where she would live most of her adult life.

Just three years later, Cassatt met a man who would change the trajectory of her career forever: Edgar Degas. At his invitation, she joined a group that would become known as the Impressionists and, under his influence, developed a love for drawing and works on paper. Inspired by the "new painting," Cassatt abandoned her former academic manner and adopted Impressionism's high-keyed hues and modern subjects. 

Best remembered for her intimate portrayals of women, children and the mother-child relationship, Cassatt was a vital contributor to the Impressionist circle. Today, her works can be found in important collections the world over, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.) and Musée d'Orsay (Paris).

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(Biography provided by M.S. Rau)

Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.

The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.

Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.

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Bring energy and an array of welcome colors and textures into your space by decorating with figurative fine-art prints and works on paper.

Figurative art stands in contrast to abstract art, which is more expressive than representational. The oldest-known work of figurative art is a figurative painting — specifically, a rock painting of an animal made over 40,000 years ago in Borneo. This remnant of a remote past has long faded, but its depiction of a cattle-like creature in elegant ocher markings endures.

Since then, figurative art has evolved significantly as it continues to represent the world, including a breadth of works on paper, including printmaking. This includes woodcuts, which are a type of relief print with perennial popularity among collectors. The artist carves into a block and applies ink to the raised surface, which is then pressed onto paper. There are also planographic prints, which use metal plates, stones or other flat surfaces as their base. The artist will often draw on the surface with grease crayon and then apply ink to those markings. Lithographs are a common version of planographic prints.

Figurative art printmaking was especially popular during the height of the Pop art movement, and this kind of work can be seen in artist Andy Warhol’s extensive use of photographic silkscreen printing. Everyday objects, logos and scenes were given a unique twist, whether in the style of a comic strip or in the use of neon colors.

Explore an impressive collection of figurative art prints for sale on 1stDibs and read about how to arrange your wall art.