Mary Cassatt could have been a character in a Henry James novel: the spirited young American woman who goes to Europe seeking her destiny. In 1979, Adelyn Dohme Breeskin, who compiled the catalogues raisonnés of Cassatt’s work, evoked the artist’s background in suitably Jamesian tones, conjuring for her readers “that legendary period when art had as yet no firm foothold in this country, when artists were set apart as strange eccentrics, and even the thought of a woman artist was considered preposterous.” That period may be more of a legend than Breeskin presumes: Cassatt was neither the only female student in her time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, nor the sole woman among the thousands of aspiring American artists trooping to Paris in those days to pursue their studies. But still, her father’s first response to her plan to go abroad was one that would have required a far less artful novelist than James to imagine: “I would almost rather see you dead.”
