This is the year of Mary Cassatt.
The beloved painter of mothers and children — the only American, and one of just a handful of women, to have been welcomed into the French impressionist boys’ club — did have a moment in the sun two years ago. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2024 exhibition “Mary Cassatt at Work,” coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the first impressionist exhibition, exploded the notion of Cassatt as little more than a painter of sentimental “Mother’s Day card clichés,” in the words of one critic.
