Mary Cassatt’s “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,” painted in 1878 and shown at the Impressionist exhibition a year later. Credit National Gallery of Art.

So how did the daughter of an American stockbroker come to meet a surly, bourgeois French artist? Degas became aware of Cassatt, known for her sensitive portrayals of women and children, in 1874, historians said. He was strolling through the Salon exhibition in Paris that spring, a highlight of the social art season, when he came across a painting of a woman in a blue gown.

According to the art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews, Degas looked at the painting and remarked, “This is someone who feels the way I do.”

(Laura M. Holson, “When Mary Met Edgar: Exploring Cassatt and Degas,” NYTimes, 10-19-19)

(c) 2019 JMN