Did Mary Cassatt make pointed statements on the value of women’s work? Find out this spring at the Art Museum

Painter Mary Cassatt’s time as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was brief but rebellious.

Though the renowned school admitted women in the 1860s, the fiercely independent artist and her female friends were forbidden from drawing live models, regardless of whether they were nude or dressed. But that didn’t stop Cassatt. Instead, the women organized their own sessions, posing for each other to practice drawing the human figure.

It was just one rule among hundreds that Cassatt broke in her life and career, and with dazzling results.

Born to a wealthy family in Pittsburgh, she was both privileged and constrained but knew from a young age that she wanted to be a working artist, not someone’s wife. Today, Cassatt is renowned as the sole American to join the mostly male French impressionism movement; counting Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro as contemporaries.

She painted odes to the daily domestic life of women around her — reading, sipping tea, embroidering, and, most prominently, mothering. These realistic and romantic portrayals provided visions of the idle recreations of the upper class, but a new exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art troubles that perspective: Did Cassatt’s brush make a more pointed statement on the value of women’s work?

“Perhaps we’ve read Cassatt’s scenes too much as scenes of leisure,” said Laurel Garber, the Park family assistant curator of prints and drawings at the museum. “For me, they have come newly visible as various kinds of work and overlooked forms of feminized activity — everyday scenes of routine care and feminized labor.”

Opening May 18, “Mary Cassatt at Work” contains more than 130 paintings, prints, and pastels, including works that have never been displayed publicly before. It’s the first major exhibition of Cassatt’s work in the United States in 25 years.

There’s a particular emphasis on the labor not just of her portrait subjects but of Cassatt’s, too. A trove of her letters in the PMA collection informed this approach: In her own words, she described long, messy days in her Parisian studio while her family compared her work ethic to a beaver’s. One notable missive came from her father, who was progressive enough to let his daughter move to France to study art but refused to pay for her studio or supplies. She was determined to be self-sufficient, anyway.

To underscore Cassatt’s constant experimentation, the PMA show takes a closer look at her printmaking process, mounting proofs side by side to see what tweaks she made between versions before arriving at the final edition. It’s like stepping into the studio and watching her tinker: The Bath series features 13 prints and drawings that each differ slightly.

As an impressionist, Cassatt has not been given the same close study as her male counterparts. In preparing this exhibit, Art Museum experts conducted scientific analyses of her works with X-rays and infrared light photography. “We’ve never done that before, despite the richness of our holdings,” said Garber. “We’ve done all sorts of imaging and analysis of the other impressionists in our collection, but she has been overlooked as a woman artist — and that includes even institutionally the way that we have attended to her works.”

Revisiting Cassatt this way provides a fresh look at the trailblazing artist through a contemporary lens at a time of increasing calls for house and care work — typically done by women — to be valued more. Cassatt surely would have agreed.

“Mary Cassatt at Work” runs May 18 to Sept. 8 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy., Philadelphia, 215-763-8100 or philamuseum.org