Perched atop a grassy hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge on San Francisco’s northwest side, the Legion of Honor is housed in a stately beaux-arts building that beautifully complements the 4,000 years of ancient and European art you’ll find inside. This year, the beloved San Francisco institution is celebrating its centennial—and it’s treating us to a very special exhibition: Mary Cassatt at Work.

Who was Mary Cassatt?

 Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was a Modernist pioneer and member of the French Impressionist movement who’s often dismissed as a sentimental painter of mothers and children. Her paintings, pastels, and prints often depicted upper-middle-class life, showing women at the opera, talking with friends, or having tea. But Cassatt’s art also portrayed “women’s work”—including needlepoint, child-rearing, and domestic tasks—deeming it worthy of serious artistic consideration while her peers were painting landscapes and pastoral scenes from everyday life.

Under the guise of acceptably feminine imagery, Cassatt snuck in subtle experimentation with both the subject matter of her art and the processes she employed to create it. She purposefully called attention to the methods of her artmaking and the iterative approach she took to reach the final product, which the exhibition at Legion of Honor highlights beautifully.

About the exhibition

Mary Cassatt at Work is the first major U.S. presentation of Cassatt’s work in more than 25 years, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in collaboration with the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.

The exhibition delves into Cassatt’s materials and processes over 50 years of artmaking, showing 93 objects on loan plus a group of distinguished works from the Fine Arts Museums’ collection. You don’t want to miss this one!

Get a taste of what’s to come

The exhibition is split into five galleries, each tailored to a central theme of Mary Cassatt’s artwork and artistic process. Take a stroll through the museum with us as we give you a glimpse into each gallery.

Impressionism: Picturing Women

Cassatt’s desire to become a professional artist was met with a lot of resistance from both her family and her social class at large. Nonetheless, she remained intent on developing her artistic career.

Cassatt found her community with the Impressionists—artists like Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro—who broke away from traditional French art institutions and pioneered new approaches to portray scenes from modern life, often rendered with bold strokes of bright, unblended color.

As an affluent woman navigating rigid Parisian society, Cassatt focused her artistic attention on depicting the social lives, intellectual interests, and handiwork of the women she called her peers. Cassatt showed her work with the Impressionists for the first time in 1879, making an impactful debut with her paintings and pastel drawings of upper-middle-class women.

Children and Childcare

Even though Cassatt never had children of her own, she took great interest in portraying the inner lives of children and the relationships they had with their caretakers. Because Cassatt poignantly depicted the physical and psychological work involved in childcare for the first meaningful time in Western art history, she quickly garnered an international reputation—and established a budding market—for her images of women and children.

Printing in Color

After attending a Japanese art exhibition in Paris in 1890, Cassatt became enamored with the bright colors, dynamic patterns, and everyday scenes of Japanese woodblock prints. She was determined to reverse engineer these elements in a Western-style intaglio print. The next winter, she created a series of color prints now known as the “Set of Ten,” which drew from Japanese precedents to depict Parisian women’s private lives, from quiet bus rides to nighttime bath rituals.

Cassatt worked closely with the master printer Modeste Leroy to invent a new method of printing in color, resulting in some of the most inventive and technically adventurous works in the history of modern printmaking.

Finished/Unfinished

Cassatt loved to lay her process bare in her color prints, paintings, and pastel drawings. This gallery highlights the artist’s endless experimentation and her desire to document the artistic process in addition to the final product.

The “Modern Madonna”

During the last 15 years of her life, Cassatt became increasingly focused on creating artwork about women and children. This mother-and-child imagery helped Cassatt start a conversation around Old Master precedents—specifically, the religious images of the Madonna and Christ Child depicted by Italian Renaissance masters.

But Cassatt’s ability to create endlessly varied compositions from this theme also connects her late work to fellow Impressionists Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, who treated the same subjects (water lilies and apples, respectively) again and again.

Event details:

Where: Legion of Honor (100 34th Ave., San Francisco, CA 94121)

When: Oct. 5, 2024-Jan. 26, 2025

Hours: 9:30 am-5:15 pm, Tuesday through Sunday; Closed on Mondays

Tickets: $20 for adults, $17 for seniors (65+), $11 for students (w/ valid ID), Free for youth (17 and under) and Legion of Honor members

Pro tip: Skip the line and book your tickets online.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of what is widely recognized as the birth of Impressionism. In April 1874, a group of art revolutionaries known as the Anonymous Society of Painters presented their groundbreaking works at Studio Nadar in Paris. This historic exhibition featured iconic artists such as Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Morisot, Degas, Sisley, Boudin, and Manet. Initially intended as an insult, the term Impressionist soon became synonymous with a revolutionary approach to art.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s, when a young artist named Erin Hanson first encountered van Gogh’s Irises and Monet’s Haystacks on a school field trip. This moment sparked a lifelong passion for Impressionism, influencing her evolution into one of today’s leading impressionistic painters. Hanson’s profound admiration for Monet and van Gogh’s use of color, motion, and light has shaped her artistic journey.

This year, Hanson embarked on a pilgrimage to immerse herself in the landscapes that inspired the Impressionist masters. Her journey included exploring Monet’s meticulously curated gardens, witnessing the Seine’s shimmering beauty, and standing in the very spots where van Gogh created masterpieces such as Starry Night.

“My sister-in-law and I debarked from the riverboat to explore Giverny and Monet’s home. Along the way, we stopped in Vetheuil, a small town that Monet liked to paint. It sits along the Seine, and it is incredibly picturesque. Signs are posted along the riverside path showing the paintings Monet created of the actual landscape I was looking at. It was incredible standing in the very footsteps where Monet had stood and painted.”

“Walking directly in Monet’s steps gave me the shivers. After absorbing the beauty of the place and letting inspiration wash over me, we headed to Giverny to walk in Monet’s footsteps further. From there, we went to Monet’s home and garden, our tickets allowing us to immediately head to the lily pond, which I was excited to see.

“We descended into a tunnel beneath the street and emerged into a bamboo garden. We walked. And walked. And walked. Where was the lily pond? We saw a tiny little pond with one sad lily pad, and I wondered, ‘Could this be it, his fabulous pond reduced to a scrap?’ It couldn’t be.

“So, we continued walking, and after one final turn in the path, the bamboo parted, and we saw Monet’s pond and Japanese Bridge in all its glory. Pure joy flooded my pores! It was just like walking into one of Monet’s masterpieces.”

“Flowers and trees surrounded the pond, reflecting off the water and adding color to the already vibrant waterscape. I realized that those squiggly lines I always saw in Monet’s depictions of his pond were reflections of weeping willow leaves, which hung low over the pond. I spent two days exploring Monet’s pond and gardens, capturing it during different times of day and different lighting effects, as the clouds drifted by above.”

“During another stop along my journey, I stayed in Etretat. After arriving on the northern coast of Normandy, we made our way to the white cliffs of Etretat, and I found the exact spot where Monet painted. I took photo after photo as the sun set, the golden light spilling over the sea and painting the white cliffs with glorious color.

“The golden hour seemed to stretch on forever as I soaked in the beauty of the place, listening to the susurrations of the sea and enjoying the sounds of people on an evening jaunt along the shore. The sun didn’t set until around 9:30 PM, and I was able to explore many aspects of Normandy’s signature white cliffs. Summer wildflowers bloomed around me. A breeze covered me in briny ocean scents as I soaked it all in. This is where Monet stood. This is where he once gathered inspiration and captured impressions with paint and brush. And here I was, standing in his footsteps, over a century later.”

“Vincent van Gogh was one of the first painters to inspire me as a child. The way he captured irises showed me that art can be even more beautiful than nature. I paint nature because it’s the most exquisite thing I know, yet art can somehow elevate this incredible masterpiece. Van Gogh taught me this.

“So, here I was, years later, in Arles. I stood in front of an olive grove, preparing to visit Saint-Remy-de-Provence. This incredible force of nature, twisting through the ground and reaching for the sky, its bark beautiful in its unevenness, called out to me. It reminded me of van Gogh’s enchanting olive groves. I knew I had to paint it.”

“I progressed through Provence and stood in the very room where van Gogh painted Almond Blossom, Irises, and The Starry Night. From there, I saw Provence’s famous lavender fields, vineyards, and, of course, sunflowers. As I explored, I found hidden treasures, snapshot impressions of sun-drenched blossoms, reflections off still ponds, ancient colonnades, and much more. I felt as if I were a squirrel, gathering all my nuts and kernels of inspiration for when I returned home to my paint, brushes, and studio.

“Now that I am back, I am using the impressions I captured to create a collection called Reflections of the Seine: Inspirations from France. This collection, which will be exhibited on Saturday, September 14th, 2024, at my McMinnville gallery, will feature the most significant impressions I captured. Those jolts of vibrant color, joy, and beauty came together to spark my paintbrush. And I cannot wait to share them.”