Sammlung: Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris

National Gallery of Art

February 14 – Aug 30, 2026

In honor of the centennial of her death in 1926, Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris celebrates the National Gallery’s unparalleled collection of works by this impressionist master, the only American and one of only three women artists who participated in the movement. Mary Cassatt was among the most radically innovative artists working in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is widely viewed through an art historical lens as a French artist—she lived in France for most of her life and was deeply immersed in the city’s culture for over four decades. Within France, however, she was and continues to be regarded unequivocally as American.  

Featuring some 40 works largely drawn from the National Gallery’s collection, including paintings and works on paper, the exhibition foregrounds how her work across media was mutually informative. Rarely seen color prints inspired by an exhibition of Japanese woodcuts Cassatt saw in Paris in 1890 are shown alongside preparatory drawings, multiple states, and unique proofs that underscore the development of her complex creative process. In preparation for the exhibition, five of the National Gallery’s paintings have been cleaned and studied.

The show begins with a work from Cassatt’s travels to Italy and Spain between 1871 and 1874, where she established herself as a professional artist. It then follows her return to Paris, where she depicted city life from a woman’s perspective. There, in some of her most iconic works, she explored the emotional and psychological dimensions of the domestic sphere—portraying women engaged in everyday activities. It concludes by interrogating Cassatt’s experimental approach to paint handling, printmaking, and drawings. She developed her method through the serial exploration of women’s lived experience in the later 19th- and early 20th-century France: going out to the opera, socializing, bathing, meditating, and taking care of children.