Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) ranks among the greatest artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That she achieved this status, rare in any case, is even more astonishing because she was a woman and an American in a field dominated almost completely by European men. Beloved for images depicting the modern woman of her age in public and private moments, often in the company of children, Cassatt created a body of work that continues to appeal to a wide range of viewers. Her pictures, most of them made in France, can now be found in the collections of individuals and institutions from Wichita to Moscow. They have been shown in hundreds of exhibitions and illustrated in more than a thousand books and periodicals for more than a century.