All living within roughly the same period, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Mary Cassatt all provided significant contributions to the Impressionistic style of artwork in their lifetimes. With famous paintings such as the Little Dancer series, Olympia, and Girl in a Blue Armchair. Though each slightly different, they still continued to maintain solid Impressionistic traits and continued to change the standard and break the norm for French artwork in their times and continue to hold influence to this day nearly 150 years later. A key attribute of Impressionistic painting is the lack of detail, but strong presence of strong, bold colors to catch the eye of the viewer. However, this remains as simply a technical attribute of the painting itself, a more prominent key of Impressionism is the powerful opposition to other art of that time. During the 19th century, it was considered much more common and normal for paintings to be of mythological or religious scenes rather to everyday life or people, in fact it was considered crude or beastly even. Despite …show more content…
Mary Cassatt became a painter at a time when it was uncommon for women to be in any influential position, yet regardless of this fact she prevailed over all expectations and became the most influential Impressionist painter from the United States. Edgar Degas strived to bring Eastern style art to Europe as his paintings were heavily influenced by the Japanese style of color and spacing of objects in paintings. The 19th century was not a peak time for feminism in Europe, yet Edouard Manet painted women with a sense of power to challenge the people of France in his time. All these painters may have worked for different reasons, yet they all expressed their struggles in the same manner, through