The first UK retrospective of Mary Cassatt, organised with the Musée d’Orsay and the MFA Boston, marks a century since the American Impressionist’s death.
The National Portrait Gallery on Trafalgar Square opens the first UK retrospective of the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt on Thursday 11 March 2027, a hundred years after she died.
Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and spent most of her adult life in France. She studied in Paris, and the Salon accepted her first painting in 1868.
In 1877, the year the Salon refused both her entries, Edgar Degas invited her to show with the Impressionists. With Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond, she became one of the movement’s three leading women.
Her subject was the lives of women in her own bourgeois world: taking tea, sitting in a theatre box and caring for children. She also worked as a printmaker, and died in France in 1926.
The exhibition is organised with the Musée d’Orsay and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. London falls between its Paris opening in October 2026 and Boston in July 2027, and most of its works have never been seen in Britain.
It gathers the women Cassatt painted, from family, friends and patrons to professional models. Its emblem is Woman in a Loge of 1879, lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.