Mary Cassatt: Friends and Family is an exhibition exploring the theme of friendship in Mary Cassatt’s art, and focuses in particular on the artist’s relationships with artists and collectors including Edgar Degas, Louisine Havemeyer, and Electra Havemeyer Webb.

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), one of the most important artists that worked in Paris in the late 1880s, was the only American to join the ranks of the Impressionists’ circle. As an American, a woman artist, and an Impressionist, Cassatt embodied the essence of modernity and innovation, and she drew inspiration from those she knew best.

An avid painter of modern life, Cassatt turned her canvas on friends and family in an effort to follow the critical tenets of the impressionistic process: painting from lived experience and the visual truth. These friendships informed the private and public tracts of Cassatt’s career.

The exhibition brings together paintings, prints, photographs, and letters that reveal the fascinating interplay of American expatriates at the turn of the century when artists and patrons defined and shaped the course of modern art.