Little Stories of Great Women Artists is an original project of playful and educational animated videos for children from the age of 7 and older.

The objective of each episode? To shed light on the life and work of a woman artist in a three-minutes video. Imagined by screenwriter Sophie Caron, each story conveys the originality of an artist’s approach, their importance within an artistic movement, certain significant biographical stories, as well as difficulties that the artist may have encountered in her practice.

In a landscape where children’s publications and activities about art privilege male artists, this new and unique project intends for younger audiences to be able to identify important figures beyond all gender stereotypes. Through the discovery of these women artists, we hope to invite as many people as possible to discover the emotion that art can bring.

This episode takes us to Paris in the late 19th century to meet the American painter Mary Cassatt.

Born in 1844 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Mary Cassatt moved to Paris in 1874. She devoted the majority of her work to scenes from women’s lives: reading, dressing, tea parties, and, above all, the relationship between a mother and her child. She practised painting and played a part in the revival of pastel and etching. For this artist, everything began with observation. As a child, she was already travelling around Europe with her family.

As a young woman, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, then set off for Paris where, as the École des Beaux-Arts was closed to women, she trained by copying the masters at the Louvre. Edgar Degas saw her painting exhibited at the 1874 Salon and invited her to exhibit with the Indépendants, which she joined in 1878 after having herself been rejected by the Salon. Her discovery of Japanese prints inspired her to create a series of colour engravings, which became one of the most distinctive of her time.