This radically new study redefines the American artist Mary Cassatt's status in the Parisian avant-garde and in American art, placing her work in the wider context of nineteenth-century feminism and art theory. Cassatt's art brought a New Woman's perspective to familiar spaces: the theater, the drawing-room and garden, the studio.

Admired by Degas - who invited her to show with the Impressionists in 1877 - Cassatt's work reveals her profound study of Old Masters and keen responses to contemporary French and Spanish painters. Griselda Pollock puts a fresh emphasis on Cassatt's interest in Manet and her influence on American collections of French modernism.

She argues that Cassatt's experimentation with etching and pastel from the late 1880s enabled her to represent children and women without sentimentality but with a deepening awareness of a complex psychological charge.