Mary Cassatt and the Feminine Ideal in 19th-Century Paris

Primarily drawn from the permanent collection, this exhibition will juxtapose the museum's strong holdings of works on paper by Mary Cassatt with images of women by her contemporaries such as Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, James Tissot, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Organized thematically, the exhibition will explore 19th-century visions of femininity ranging from the bourgeois wife and mother to peasant women of the countryside in the midst of rural labor to urban women at work in the ballet and the brothel.