The stated goal of Ruth E. Iskin’s fascinating book is to “reenvision Cassatt’s life, career, and art in the context of her transatlantic friendships, networks, collecting activities, and politics” (1). In many respects, this aim of understanding an artist’s work within the context of their life is not a radical one. However, Mary Cassatt’s unique position as an American female Impressionist artist working and living in nineteenth-century Paris creates a complexity that has no doubt played a role in her relative marginalisation in studies of Impressionism. At the heart of this complexity is of course, her gender, and Iskin’s careful reappraisal of Cassatt’s artistic life is also a subtle commentary on art history and its visible and invisible processes of inclusion and exclusion. Through her introduction and seven chapters, Iskin weaves a bold, but engaging narrative, anchored in Cassatt’s lived experience. She reveals how Cassatt deftly navigated her multiple identifications across cultures, contributed to emerging feminist and national artistic agendas, impacted the collecting practices of major American museums, and collaborated with and inspired the French Impressionists, thus reframing her importance and legacy for twenty-first-century historians of art.

Chapter one opens the discussion via a focus on Cassatt’s transatlantic network. Here, characters such as James J. Stillman, Sarah Choate Sears, Theodate Pope, Sara T Hallowell, and Forbes Masons come to life through extensive use of photographs and letters. This approach allows aspects of the artist’s life that would not usually be analysed to be highlighted, facilitating rich interpretations of nineteenth-century artistic life. For example, Iskin’s discussion of spiritualism with reference to her friendship with Pope offers an intriguing glimpse into this popular activity and its artistic and intellectual impact on society. She writes: “Cassatt and Pope exchanged information on which mediums were best for séances, and, in some cases, Cassatt asked Pope to write to her about what the medium had said in a particular séance. [ . . . ] Pope, for her part, used some of her resources to fund a position for a Harvard scholar in the field of psychic research [ . . . ]” (39).

Many of Cassatt’s friends were women, and Iskin’s book highlights their contribution to the development of American art and national museums. The second chapter is devoted to Louisine Havemeyer, whom Cassatt met in Paris in 1874 and whose friendship was the “closest, longest, and most important friendship of her lifetime” (55). Cassatt’s friendship with Havemeyer, which began as a mentorship, evolved into a professional relationship when she advised Louisine and her husband Harry on art collecting, drawing on her contacts with dealers, critics, agents and artists in the Parisian art world to help make the couple one of the leading American collectors of modern art. It was around suffrage that the Cassatt-Havemeyer alliance came into its own with Louisine integrating her passion for collecting with her advocacy for suffrage by organising exhibitions in support of the cause. Iskin’s discussion of the fractures in the relationship is also of interest, particularly concerning politics and the peace terms at the end of WWI. Writes Iskin: “Although Cassatt’s identification as an American did not falter, she understood the situation in Europe at the end of the war quite differently from Havemeyer simply because she experienced the conditions on the ground” (89).

Throughout the book, careful analysis of Cassatt’s correspondence means that the artist’s acute engagement with the details of modern artistic and political life in America and France is keenly felt. The chapter on Cassatt’s relationship with Degas will likely interest art historians most. As Iskin observes, “a slanted narrative prevailed in art historical scholarship” that meant that “on the one hand, Degas literature overlooked or drastically minimized his friendship with Cassatt; and, on the other hand, much of the Cassatt scholarship tended to exaggerate Degas’s role in her life and career while misrepresenting it in several ways” (97). Here, Iskin focuses in on key works, mainly of toilette scenes, to emphasise Cassatt and Degas’s mutual artistic exchange and collaboration. But she also draws out Cassatt’s originality, particularly in relation to print-making, where “enthralled by a culture alien to her own, she [was] deeply touched by the aesthetics of Japanese prints [and] developed a new hybrid language” (124). Importantly, Iskin pays attention to Cassatt’s role in shaping Degas’s transatlantic legacy, advising American collectors to buy his art and helping him out of his acute financial crisis, which she argues was “simultaneously an act of friendship, collegial support, and professional judgement” (126).

Chapter four expands on the theme of suffrage, discussed in relation to Havemeyer, to offer a probing account of Cassatt’s transatlantic feminism. Again, it is the complexity of Cassatt’s position as a leading female Impressionist artist and an American in Paris that singles out her contribution: “she developed her pro-suffrage position and feminist outlook in France where she lived, but all the while kept a close affiliation with her homeland” (133). In addition, while well-informed, hers was a “vicarious” (136) participation through Havemeyer’s activism; Cassatt did not have any actual experience in taking part in the battle for the vote. Her feminism was most visible in how she lived her life, refusing to conform to the ideology of separate spheres, carving out a clear professional identity as an artist, and in her acute understanding of the interrelationship between public space and political and citizen rights of women.

However, the home is not set in opposition to the city in Cassatt’s art, and its depiction echoes nineteenth-century contemporary feminist discourses on domestic management. Her works that show women in the home need to be understood in this larger context, as Iskin argues, revealing “a deliberate emphasis on the value of women’s role within the home, as a way of buttressing the argument for women’s equal access to the public sphere” (154). Politics, therefore, is ever-present in Cassatt, though often in subtle ways.

Chapter five continues this expansive rereading of Cassatt’s work in context by drawing attention to representations of lesser-discussed topics, namely older women, elite American fatherhood, women’s community, and women as educators and mentors. This multifaceted lens covers a range of portraits, embodying them with historical context and nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminist insights that allow a rich interpretation of works such as Child Picking a Fruit (1893, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) and The Crochet Lesson (1913, The Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery), moving away from a maternal to a mentoring narrative.

The final two chapters discuss exhibition histories and museum acquisitions, namely the 1915 Cassatt and Degas exhibition in New York, and Cassatt’s legacy in art museums. As Iskin contends, the 1915 exhibition, organised by Havemeyer was unique and radical in that it treated the two artists as equals with an underlying message of gender equality. Moreover, this radical venture was also visible in the way the exhibition placed Degas and Cassatt in the company of the Old Masters, “grounding them within the canon of European art and asserting their equality with the old masters” (212). Iskin’s final chapter in many respects serves as a lament for this type of exhibition decision-making in twentieth and twenty-first century museums, where she mentions in passing that “The Met, to date, has not curated or hosted a retrospective exhibition of Mary Cassatt’s art” and “a lingering gender bias likely explains the contrast between this modest representation and the Met’s rich record of Cassatt’s contemporaries” (226).

Iskin’s argument, in many ways, in this unusual book—itself a composite form of art-historical monograph and artist biography—is like Cassatt’s art. It is subtly political, highlighting on the one hand “the exemplary Havemeyer collection at the Met” and encouraging further exhibitions, such as the recent Washington DC retrospective but all the while acknowledging that that “her display in French museums does not quite live up to Clemenceau’s pronouncement of her in the early twentieth century as one of France’s glories” (249). Iskin’s book thus is not only a welcome addition to studies of nineteenth-century art history but also is a call to arms to museum curators and directors, as well as historians, to embrace the complexity and humanity of artists’ lives to offer a more inclusive vision of modern art.