Mary Cassatt Unit Study

Biography
Read about Mary Cassatt online at WetCanvas, a virtual museum.

Read "Mary Cassatt (a Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists book)."

Read about Mary Cassatt's life and times online at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Before Studying Art
Please check out these excellent resources for looking at art with children. You can print out questions that will inspire reflection and conversation. (I laminated this page and added it to our art shelf.) MOMA also has a downloadable PDF for looking at art and provides examples of how to do so.

Online Art
Take an online tour of Mary Cassatt's work at the National Gallery of Art. (It has a bio, and 10 paintings by her. If you click on the name of the painting at the bottom, you get to good background info on the work.)

Visit CGFA, the beautiful nonprofit online gallery's Cassatt section. (It has three pages of Cassatt thumbnails that you can click to enlarge and study.)

Read the brief analytical info about specific Mary Cassatt works.

Activities
Paint a coloring page of Mary Cassatt's "The Boating Party."

Work on the free printable "Artist of Influence" biography sheet.

Take a family picture in the style of Mary Cassatt then draw it or paint it.

Look up Pennsylvania (Mary's home state) and France (where Mary's true heart was) on the globe.

Do the Mary Cassatt activity in the book "Discovering Great Artists."

Check out the coloring book of Cassatt work. It's inexpensive, but you'll have to get this ahead of time for the unit study.

Cassatt learned about art by copying the masters when she was young. Choose a favorite work and attentively copy it.

Check out the four coloring pages for Cassatt works.

Choose a favorite painting and write a description for it.

Choose a couple of favorite paintings by Cassatt, print them out and create a little gallery on paper. Make sure to draw the frames for each picture and to include yourself in it as a gallery visitor.

Additional Resources
Mary Cassatt's sponsor and friend was Degas. Spend time learning about this master's work.

"A Child's Book of Lullabies" is a thin but lovely book with beloved old-fashioned lullabies, each accompanied with a beautiful print of a Cassatt painting. If you have little ones, it's worth adding it to your library.