The New Britain Museum of American Art is preparing to open an exhibition that puts Mary Cassatt’s personal and professional relationships at the center of her story, pairing her own pastels with 18 works borrowed from other institutions. Among Friends: Mary Cassatt and Her Circle runs from Nov. 7, 2026, through Feb. 14, 2027, and draws on a museum collection of more than 10,000 pieces alongside loans that trace the artists, collectors and friends who shaped Cassatt’s career.
The show explores the interpersonal dynamics, artistic collaborations and personal relationships that defined Cassatt’s life and work, according to findingconnecticut.com. As the New Britain Herald reports, the exhibition grew out of the museum’s own effort to research and spotlight works already in its holdings, with planning that included conversations with regional museums holding important Cassatt pieces, among them the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and the Hill-Stead Museum.
A Pastel Anchors the Show
Centerpiece of the New Britain presentation is Cassatt’s 1891 pastel “A Caress,” a work from the museum’s own permanent collection that will be shown alongside prints by Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot, both artists in Cassatt’s immediate circle. The piece, cataloged by the museum under the identifier 1948.14, measures 29 1/4 by 23 3/4 inches and carries the credit line of the Harriet Russell Stanley Fund, per ink.nbmaa.org. Cassatt lived from 1844 to 1926 and was, per the New Britain Museum of American Art, the only American artist to exhibit with the French Impressionists, a movement that rejected many of the traditional rules of art in its time.
Beyond the pastel, 18 loaned works will round out the exhibition, arriving from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, Colby College Museum of Art and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the Herald reports. Nearby galleries will also feature American artists from Cassatt’s broader circle who traveled between the United States and Europe, figures the museum credits with helping bring Impressionism to the United States, including Connecticut.
Curators Behind the Project
Elizabeth Levie, the museum’s Polly Thayer Starr Curatorial Fellow, curated the exhibition together with Stephanie Heydt, the museum’s director of collections and exhibitions, according to findingconnecticut.com. The museum plans a public lecture, gallery talks and family programs timed to the run, per the Herald’s reporting.
Cassatt built her career as a professional woman artist at a time when women faced major barriers in the art world, and she worked closely with other artists while helping introduce modern French art to American audiences through her connections with U.S. collectors. She entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at age 16 and left five years later to study in Paris, according to timesargus.com, which notes she began exhibiting at the Paris Salon in the 1870s before breaking with the academy to pursue Impressionist techniques by decade’s end.
Cassatt’s Role as Collector and Ambassador
Cassatt did more than paint; she expended significant energy cultivating a new market for Impressionism in the United States, according to the Shelburne Museum. Her close friends Louisine and Henry Havemeyer became, with her guidance and the help of dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, among the most active collectors of modern French art in America during the 1890s. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco note that Cassatt contributed to four of the Impressionists’ famed group exhibitions and became an ambassador for the movement stateside, per famsf.org.
New Britain’s show joins a recent wave of Cassatt exhibitions elsewhere in the country. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco presented “Mary Cassatt at Work” at the Legion of Honor from October 2024 through January 2025, featuring 93 objects on loan from institutions including the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which lent its 1881 oil painting “Driving” to that same presentation, described it as the first large-scale exhibition of Cassatt’s work in the U.S. in 25 years, according to press.philamuseum.org.
Other institutions have taken their own angles on Cassatt’s relationships. Fenimore Art Museum presented an exhibition examining Cassatt’s friendship with Morisot, tracing it from its rocky beginnings in the 1870s to their closest period in the 1890s and including Cassatt’s 1894 painting “Summertime,” per fenimoreartmuseum.org. The Art Institute of Chicago’s “Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism,” curated by Annelise K. Madsen, features more than 75 paintings, works on paper and ephemera, according to artic.edu, though a separate search-result snippet from the same site describes the show as showcasing 70 such works.
For New Britain, the Among Friends exhibition offers a chance to put its own Cassatt holding in conversation with loans gathered specifically to illuminate the artist’s circle of collaborators and collectors. With the show opening next month and running into mid-February, the museum is positioning its take on Cassatt around the relationships that shaped her work rather than a straightforward survey of her career.
