Artist Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania
Though women of her day were discouraged from pursuing a career, Mary Cassatt enrolled in Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at age 16.
Mary Cassatt left for Paris in 1866. She began her study with private art lessons in the Louvre, where she would study and copy masterpieces.
After 1910, her increasingly poor eyesight virtually put an end to her serious painting, and she died in 1926.
To raise funds, she tried to sell some of her paintings in New York, but to no avail. When she tried again to sell them through a dealer in Chicago, the paintings were tragically destroyed in a fire in 1871.
