Mary Cassatt was an American artist and printmaker, who exhibited with the Impressionists and was one of only a few nineteenth-century American women to pursue a professional career as an artist. Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania in 1844 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. However, she spent most of her adult life in France, notably Paris, where she enjoyed the mentorship Edgar Degas. At the beginning of her career, Cassatt’s subjects were her family and scenes at the theater and the opera. From the mid-1880s she increasingly turned her attention towards women and children, specializing in the theme of mother and child. Like Degas, Cassatt’s portraits often have an observational feel and she is particularly celebrated for the warmth with which she depicted the natural attitudes and characters of her young subjects.