Mary Cassatt said she could live alone. Her first biographer called her a painter of children and mothers, and this season’s museums call her independent. Degas looked at one of her mothers and saw an English nurse. In the pictures, someone is always being held.

Louisine Havemeyer, her friend for half a century, kept what Cassatt would not: her stories of Degas, the portrait in the closet, the sentence about living alone that this season’s museums have printed on their pages. The memoir that holds her voice has chapters on Degas, Manet, Courbet and Whistler, and none on her.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, October 18, 2026

When Degas saw the picture Mary Cassatt called her Boy before the Mirror, he asked their dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, where she was. “I must see her at once,” he said; it was “the greatest picture of the century.” When they met he went over it with her detail by detail, praising everything, and then, as if he regretted having said so much, he added that it had “all your qualities and all your faults.” It was, he said, l’Enfant Jésus et sa bonne anglaise: the infant Jesus and his English nurse.

We know this because she told it on herself. She told it to Louisine Havemeyer, the New York collector who had been her friend since 1874, in a conversation Louisine drew out of her while Degas was still alive and wrote down afterward. Cassatt had been describing his cruelties, the young painter in a color shop at whose canvas Degas glanced before telling him that he pitied him, and Louisine asked the obvious question. “How could you get on with him?” “Oh,” Cassatt answered, “I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work.” It made him furious, she said, that he could not find “a chink in my armor.” There were months when they could not see each other, and then something she painted would bring them together again.

The two halves of that conversation have been traveling separately ever since. The first, the joke about the nurse, is the shadow of the word that has hung on her pictures for more than a century. Her only biographer in her lifetime, Achille Segard, called his 1913 book Mary Cassatt: un peintre des enfants et des mères, and the description never came off. None of this is anyone’s mistake. It is what the pictures do. You stand before a woman bent with a child over a basin of water, and the word mother arrives before you have decided to think it. What is actually in front of you is a weight, and the hands taking it.

The second half is having its season, under three titles. The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition, open since October 6, is Mary Cassatt. L’indépendante. When it moves to London in March it becomes Radical Impressionist, and the catalogue from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where the tour ends, is called I Am Independent. The name stays; the adjective travels. Paris and Boston both quote her sentence. Independence is a better word than the old one, and truer to the life: to the woman who trained herself in the galleries of Parma and Madrid rather than in a Paris academy, who joined the painters Degas insisted on calling the Independents, who never married and in a single year refused two prizes. Printed on a museum’s page, the sentence is a declaration. In the room where she said it, it was an answer to a question about a man. And like the old word, it survives because someone else kept it. Cassatt wrote no memoir, and she kept none of Degas’s letters. “It is a great pity that she did not keep his letters,” her friend wrote, “nor write down her impressions.” The woman who could live alone did not keep the record of her own life. Someone else did, and she let her.

I

Sixteen to Sixty

The book is called Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector. It was printed in 1961 “for the family of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” thirty-two years after its author died. Much of it was written during the First World War, and its last chapter ends on a letter from Cassatt that arrived, Louisine says, “only today,” at the close of the war’s third year.

Read the contents in their order. The Music Room. The Library. Prominent Men of My Time: two Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, James J. Hill, Alexander Graham Bell. Baron Kamura and Lord Kitchener. Helen Keller. A Great Actress of Japan. Tea Jars and Potteries. Visit to Italy, 1901. Visit to Spain. Gustave Courbet. Whistler. Manet. Edgar Degas.

There is no chapter on Mary Cassatt. She enters the book as a distance, in a telephone man’s promise that Louisine will soon speak to Miss Cassatt in Paris as easily as to a friend two thousand miles off. From the Italian chapter on, Cassatt is on nearly every page, pacing the wharf at Genoa as the ship comes in, talking Veronese in the Uffizi, finishing, in a Castilian that came back to her as she spoke, a bargain Louisine had begun in a Spanish dealer’s shop. “As usual, I owe it to Miss Cassatt,” Louisine writes of a Courbet, and again of a Degas, and the phrase could stand at the head of half the chapters. The woman who gave the collection its shape has no chapter of her own because she is the condition of all of them.

The debt ran both ways, and the book shows which way it ran first. Cassatt took the young Louisine to see a Degas pastel of a ballet rehearsal in the shop where it was for sale, and had her buy it for five hundred francs, half of what she had saved for pictures. Louisine admits she did not know whether she liked it. Cassatt took her to a Courbet exhibition in 1881, stood her in front of a nude, and told her she must own one some day. Louisine learned to look by borrowing Cassatt’s eye, and the record of the woman who lent it was kept by the woman who borrowed it.

The conversation this season’s museums quote is in the Degas chapter, and Louisine stages it. She had asked for Degas’s early history. Cassatt supplied a great-grandfather who fled the Terror for Naples and lived by selling pumice stone, carried the family down to the present, and stopped. Louisine saw “a look of reminiscence in her eye” and pleaded for more, and she “led her on,” she says, to the question of how Cassatt could bear him. Adelyn Breeskin, cataloguing her for the National Gallery, quoted the answer in 1970, and the museums quote it now.

It reached the page through Louisine’s memory, which she does not oversell. Of another conversation she writes that she gives Cassatt’s words “as nearly as I can remember them.” Her dates drift. She says she was about sixteen when she bought that first Degas, and the title says so too, but its present owner, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, places the purchase by 1877, when she was twenty-one. The inside account has its own narrator, and the narrator is a friend with a gift for scenes.

One more passage reverses the usual traffic between a painter and the women in a painter’s pictures. Cassatt secured for the Havemeyers Degas’s large pastel of a woman trying on a hat before a long mirror, and Louisine adds: “Miss Cassatt posed for this picture.” The Metropolitan’s page for the picture agrees. Asked whether she often sat for him, Cassatt answered, Louisine says, “carelessly”: only now and then, when he found a movement difficult and his model could not get the idea. The painter of women at their mirrors is herself a woman at a mirror, standing in for a model, in a picture a man made.

Louisine also brought out what Cassatt had put away. A portrait of a relative, her mother’s cousin Mrs. Riddle at her tea table, “met with no approval from the sitter or her family,” and Cassatt put it in a closet. It came out some thirty years later because Louisine insisted it be shown, and Cassatt gave it to the Metropolitan, “wondering deprecatingly if such a gift were worth while when she ‘was so little known at home.’”

None of this is a scandal. Cassatt’s letters survive in quantity. But on the subject the museums have made her emblem, her independence and the man it was armor against, the record is a friend’s, because Cassatt declined to keep her own. Louisine’s lament that she kept no letters from him and wrote down no impressions of him ends with its reason: “no one understood him better.” Louisine kept what she could instead: what Cassatt said about him, as nearly as she could remember it, in a book printed for a family, with no chapter for the woman who is on every page.

II

L’Indépendante

Visite à Degas. On May 16, 1879, the librettist Ludovic Halévy called on his friend Degas and found him “en compagnie de l’indépendante miss Cassatt, un des exposants”: in the company of the independent Miss Cassatt, one of the exhibitors. They were “fort excités,” he wrote. Each had cleared 440 francs from the exhibition, and they were thinking of starting a journal. In the room where the word began, it was a membership. She was one of the Independents, and she had joined at his invitation two years before.

Everything the museums claim for the word is true. She told Segard, in Breeskin’s translation, that from then on she “could work with absolute independence without considering the opinion of a jury,” and that she “began to live.” In 1904 the Pennsylvania Academy gave her its Lippincott Prize and the Art Institute of Chicago its Harris Prize, both for the same painting, and she refused both. “No jury, no medals, no awards,” she wrote to the Academy. She accepted the Legion of Honor that year and, ten years later, the Academy’s gold medal, and that acceptance, the critic Margaret Breuning notes, “is the only instance of this kind.”

But the independence was from juries, not from judgment, and the judgment she wanted was one man’s. Working on her mural for the Chicago fair, she wrote to Bertha Palmer that she had more than once nearly asked Degas to see it and had not: in the wrong mood he would demolish her too completely to finish in time. Still, he was “the only man I know whose judgment would be a help to me.” He “dissolves your will power,” she told Louisine. The journal Halévy heard them planning was Degas’s, a journal of prints called Le Jour et la Nuit; she worked hard on her plates for it, and it never appeared. The dependence ran both ways, though not evenly. When Louisine bought her first Degas on Cassatt’s advice, he wrote to thank Cassatt because, Louisine learned, he was “sadly in need of it.”

Nor, in the years when the word was first pinned to her, did she live alone. In 1877, the year Degas came to her studio with his invitation, her parents and her sister Lydia moved to Paris to live with her. Lydia had Bright’s disease. She sat for her sister in the years before she died: at the opera in a pearl necklace, at the tea table, driving a pony cart with Degas’s small niece beside her, and last at a tapestry frame. She died on November 7, 1882. In 1884 Cassatt took her ailing mother to Spain for her health. Her father died in 1891, her mother in 1895. She was fifty-one before she lived without her family, and had spent the eighteen years in which she made her name running a household of the sick and the old. When she told Louisine she could live alone, she spoke as the one who had done the holding.

Later, others came to depend on her eye. On the collecting trips it served the Havemeyers, and it cost her. In Rome in 1901 she told Louisine that all that art upset her terribly, and that it would be months before she could settle down to work again. Breeskin’s verdict is that her own art “suffered in consequence, especially after 1905.” Louisine records one refusal, though. In Spain a dealer who had just sold Louisine a Greco brought out a second, a Saint Peter in a brilliant green robe, and Cassatt, who admired it, decided against it for herself: it was large, and it “might upset her in her work.” She could lend the eye. The work she kept.

III

February 1910

The other half of that conversation had the easier journey. Good Housekeeping printed its motto across the top of the page: “Conducted in the Interests of the Higher Life of the Household.” In February 1910 it gave six pages to Gardner Teall’s “Mother and Child: The Theme as Developed in the Art of Mary Cassatt,” and its first sentence turns the word into the Word: “The mother and child in painting is art’s supreme subject.” Teall calls her “this American girl.” She was sixty-five. He has her working “long and faithfully under Degas,” which is how she was sold and not what she was; Breuning’s correction is exact: “his disciple, never his pupil.”

The pictures came from her dealer. “All the illustrations for this article, except the one on Page 145,” a note says, “are from photographs by courtesy of Durand-Ruel Sons,” and under them the magazine printed titles like “Mother’s Kiss” and “The Baby’s Toilette.” Durand-Ruel, a curator at the National Gallery writes, had encouraged her to take up the subject. The exception came from a museum. The Metropolitan had bought it the year before, and the magazine printed it as “Mother and Child”: a naked toddler sitting up on a bed, leaning into the shoulder of a woman whose hands are on his leg, a tray of cups in front of them. The museum’s own entry says the child “is said to have been a boy named Jules, one of Cassatt’s frequent models.” Of everything the magazine showed to illustrate art’s supreme subject, the one picture a museum vouched for shows a child who was one of her models.

Teall ends by doubting “if there exists a photograph of her” and deciding that her pictures “are almost themselves portraits of the soul of this great artist.” For want of a record, the magazine made the mothers her self-portrait.

By 1910 she was known, and known by one word. The Metropolitan bought its picture in 1909. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston accessioned In the Loge on February 17, 1910, the month of the magazine, and the Art Institute bought The Child’s Bath that year, its first Cassatt. The museums and the magazine arrived in the same season, and the magazine arrived with the caption already on.

IV

What Is in the Pictures

Look at the pictures as if the captions had been cut off, and begin where she began with the Independents. In those first years she painted her sister again and again: Lydia reading the morning paper, at the opera in her pearls, at the tea table, crocheting in the garden at Marly, bent over a tapestry frame. The one child among those pictures, in the pony cart, is Degas’s niece. The mothers came later, through the 1880s and above all the 1890s. The painter of childhood began as the painter of a grown woman absorbed in something: a newspaper, a cup, a needle, the stage.

The best-known child of those years is alone. In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, painted in 1878, a small girl sprawls in an overstuffed chair too big for her, and on the opposite chair a little dog is asleep. The National Gallery, which owns the picture, supplies what the title leaves out. The girl was the daughter of friends of Degas. The dog was Baptiste, Cassatt’s own griffon, which Degas had helped her find; infrared images show she first tried him on the floor and then moved him back to the chair. And the corner of the room behind the furniture, where two walls meet and the space opens, is probably Degas’s work. It isn’t in her first lay-in, and the paint there is scraped and rubbed in his manner, not hers. She said as much herself, years later, in a letter to Vollard: he “even worked on it.” When the American section of the 1878 Exposition refused the picture, she was furious, “all the more so since he had worked on it.” Of the jury of three, “one was a pharmacist.” The child is held by nothing but upholstery. The room around her was held together by a man’s hand.

Fifteen years later the children are held. The Child’s Bath, from 1893, is seen from so steeply above that the carpet stands up behind the figures like a wall, and pattern is everywhere: the striped dress, the rug, the pitcher. Both heads bend toward one small foot in a basin. The Art Institute of Chicago, its owner since 1910, describes it exactly: “a woman steadies a young charge on her lap,” and holds the foot in the basin. A woman; a charge. The label declines the word everyone brings to the picture, and the picture backs the label. Nothing in it says who this woman is to this child. What it shows is that the child’s whole weight is on her, and her whole attention is on the foot.

Then the picture Degas mocked. The Metropolitan’s Mother and Child (The Oval Mirror), from about 1899, is the canvas Cassatt called her “Boy before the Mirror,” and the museum’s label tells its history in four sentences. The first is the Word, stated as fact: “Here, Cassatt underscored the importance of the maternal bond by evoking religious art.” The boy’s pose and “the oval mirror that frames the boy’s head like a halo” recall the Virgin and Child. Degas’s verdict, the label goes on, was that it was “the Infant Jesus and his English nurse.” And the Havemeyers, who bought it, “referred to it as ‘The Florentine Madonna.’” So the Madonna is not a critic’s inference. It was the owners’ pet name for the picture, and the nurse was Degas’s. The same label, having asserted the maternal bond, calls her only “the woman”; the noun is left to the title. And the title is the museum’s: it hangs the oldest caption beside the painting Degas read as a servant holding someone else’s god.

The museums know who was in the pictures. The National Portrait Gallery’s page for the London showing says the exhibition brings together her family and friends and also “patrons and professional models, as well as anonymous figures whose lives remain largely unknown.” Breeskin noted half a century ago which of the young women were nurses. Late in life, she added, Cassatt preferred young country women from around her château for her mothers, because they held a baby better than any professional model. One was about seventeen. Breuning, defending the mothers in 1944, called them “no starry-eyed Madonnas gazing worshipfully at their children, but healthy young women taking delight in the charms of the young lives entrusted to them.” Her verb was chosen with care: entrusted. What the titles have not done is let that knowledge in. Who held the baby is a fact about the sitting. What the holding looks like is a fact about the painting. Mother is a fact about the viewer.

What is in front of you, in all three pictures, is the same thing, and it is not a feeling. There is a child given over to a chair or to a lap, and something or someone doing the holding. In the woman, where there is one, there is an attention that goes entirely to the child. The pictures are of dependence: a body that cannot hold itself up, and someone whose whole attention is on holding it. Dependence is not an emotion. It is a condition. She had no children. The children she painted were her brothers’, her friends’ and the village’s, and the women holding them were often paid to hold them.

V

I Can Live Alone

She had told Louisine two things, that she could live alone and that she loved to work. The work went first, and it stopped twice. Around 1910 she gave up drypoint, because the shine of the copper hurt her eyes. Then, on a family journey up the Nile, her brother Gardner fell ill, and in 1911 he died in Paris. She broke down and did no work for almost two years. The caption kept coming when she could not answer it: in September 1911 Harper’s printed Henry Wolf’s wood engraving after one of her paintings, titled “Mother and Child,” with a comment by W. Stanton Howard. The first operation on her cataracts came in 1912. In 1913 she tried again, in pastel, with colors that grew louder as her sight dimmed, and she thought those pastels her finest. In 1914 she stopped.

Then the war. Her château was in the war zone, and she spent most of the war at Grasse. In April 1915 her pictures hung beside Degas’s in New York, at Knoedler’s, in Louisine’s benefit for woman suffrage, and the Orsay ends its show with a few of them. The painter was in France, and no longer painting. Mathilde Vallet, her housekeeper and companion for decades, was an Alsatian, and so a German national, and the French expelled her with the other German nationals. Cassatt had lived without her family since 1895. Now the war took Mathilde too.

She had watched another painter’s eyes go. Degas would sometimes greet her with his eyes shut, Louisine writes, groping his way to the studio door and complaining that he was going blind, and then show her some glowing canvas he had just finished. Later, writing to Louisine about one of his old pictures, Cassatt reported that he had looked at it and turned away: “When I did that I had my eyes!” At the close of the third year of the war she wrote to her friend about him once more. “Poor Degas is always the same. What a world it is!” And then the darkest line of hers that Louisine recorded: “Oh! to get out of it without too much suffering!” Louisine, closing her chapter, set beside the letter “one of her favorite quotations,” four lines of Matthew Arnold’s:

The candor was hers. The verse was borrowed, and the friend chose what to borrow. Degas died in September 1917.

In 1923, nearly blind, she found a group of old plates in her studio and had them printed again by Eugène Delâtre, the son of her original printer. The next year, the Musée d’Orsay writes, un malentendu à propos de matrices de gravures, a misunderstanding about printing plates, ended her friendship with Louisine for good. Forbes Watson, who knew her, called it a temporary break. The sources disagree whether it healed, and the record that would settle it is the kind she never kept. Watson’s phrase for her last years is “the blindness that she would not acknowledge.” The quarrel was about what was on the copper, and she was the one person in it who could not see.

She died at Beaufresne on June 14, 1926. Mathilde had come back after the war, and some of Cassatt’s drawings went to her. Louisine, estranged or not, wrote her tribute for the Cassatt exhibition in Philadelphia the next spring, died in January 1929, and left much of her collection to the Metropolitan, Cassatt’s pictures among it, so that the friend’s collection carried home the painter who had been so little known there. The memoir was printed for the family in 1961.

She could live alone. They could not. She painted them for thirty years. In every picture somebody is being held, and the woman holding them is looking down, with her whole attention, at a child who may not be hers, as though nothing else in the world were her business.

⁂

Louisine W. Havemeyer’s Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector was printed in 1961 for the family of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The conversation about Degas in which Cassatt says she is independent is at pp. 243–245; the essay also draws on pp. vii–viii, 41, 97, 135, 190, 202, 248–250, 256–258 and 264–267, and quotes the memoir only briefly. Margaret Breuning’s Mary Cassatt (Hyperion Press, 1944) is quoted from pp. 5–10. Achille Segard’s Mary Cassatt: un peintre des enfants et des mères (1913) is quoted in Adelyn Dohme Breeskin’s translation, from Mary Cassatt 1844–1926 (National Gallery of Art, 1970), the catalogue that also supplies the chronology of the household, Lydia’s sittings, the hired models, the cataracts and the last pastels. The season’s exhibitions are the Musée d’Orsay’s Mary Cassatt. L’indépendante, open since October 6, 2026; the National Portrait Gallery’s Mary Cassatt: Radical Impressionist, from March 11, 2027; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, whose catalogue, Mary Cassatt: I Am Independent, is forthcoming from MFA Publications.

Five quotations reach the essay through an intermediary, and each is credited to its route. Ludovic Halévy’s entry for May 16, 1879, is from his Carnets, printed in the Revue des deux mondes, December 15, 1937, as reproduced by the Ministère de la Culture in “1880 – Cinquième exposition.” Segard is quoted in Breeskin’s translation, as above. Cassatt’s letter to Bertha Palmer comes via Julia M. H. Carson’s Mary Cassatt (1966), p. 98, as cited by Breeskin, and her letter to Ambroise Vollard via Vollard’s Recollections of a Picture Dealer (1936), as quoted by Breeskin. “No jury, no medals, no awards” is from the Pennsylvania Academy’s board minutes of March 14, 1904, as quoted by Crawford Alexander Mann III in Smithsonian, June 3, 2025. The Lippincott Prize is recorded in the Academy’s 98th Annual Report and the Harris Prize in Forbes Watson’s Mary Cassatt (1932), which also gives the temporary break and “the blindness that she would not acknowledge.” Gardner Teall’s “Mother and Child: The Theme as Developed in the Art of Mary Cassatt” appeared in Good Housekeeping, vol. 50, no. 2, February 1910, pp. 141–146, read in the Internet Archive’s scan; Henry Wolf’s engraving, with W. Stanton Howard’s comment, in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, September 1911. Mary Morton writes of Durand-Ruel in “Rediscovering Mary Cassatt,” in the National Gallery’s Center 46.

Museum texts are quoted from the institutions’ websites as they read in October 2026: the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Mother and Child (The Oval Mirror) (29.100.47), Mother and Child (Baby Getting Up from His Nap) (09.27), Degas’s At the Milliner’s (29.100.38) and the restrikes Eugène Delâtre printed in 1923; the Art Institute of Chicago for The Child’s Bath (1910.2); the National Gallery of Art for Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1983.1.18); the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for Degas’s Rehearsal of the Ballet; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for In the Loge (10.35); the National Portrait Gallery; the Delaware Art Museum; the Morgan Library & Museum; and the Musée d’Orsay’s “Qui était Louisine Havemeyer ?” Mathilde Vallet’s years with Cassatt and her expulsion are from Margaret Tsuda in The Christian Science Monitor, May 1, 1984, from Watson, and from Les Amis de Mary Cassatt; the journey up the Nile is from Women in World History; the span of Cassatt’s letters to Louisine, 1901 to 1920, is from the Met Archives’ finding aid to the Havemeyer Family Papers (Adrianna Del Collo, 2009). Louisine’s tribute, “The Cassatt Exhibition,” ran in the Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin in May 1927. Matthew Arnold’s stanza is from “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” (1852), as Louisine printed it and as it stands in Project Gutenberg’s text of his poems. Direct quotations were checked against the sources named; Cassatt’s other remarks are paraphrased. The first essay in this series, “The Loneliness Thing,” was on Edward Hopper. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1; copy editing by Gemini Argon. The header and interior images were generated with Gemini Argon for this essay in the manner of Cassatt; neither reproduces a painting of hers.