Past Meeting

At our public meeting on Sunday, October 16, 2011 the featured presentation was:

Mary Cassatt: The American Impressionist

by Cheryl Leibold

Mary Cassatt, born in western Pennsylvania and growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, knew from her mid-teens that she wanted to become a professional painter. To achieve her dream, she moved to Europe in her twenties and never resided in the US again. She is  best known as the only American among the famous Impressionist painters working in Paris in the 1870s.  This talk presented the highlights of her career, as well as a look at the Cassatt’s family’s connections to Tredyffrin Township.

To lead us in this fascinating study was Cheryl Leibold, who served for 23 years as Archivist at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She is the co-author of two of the Academy’s catalogues of its important collection of the work of Thomas Eakins: Eakins and the Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and his Circle (1989), and Writing About Eakins (1995).

She has lectured and published on various aspects of the Academy’s history — her article “The Historic Cast Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts” appeared in the fall 2009 issue of Antiques & Fine Art.

Cheryl lives in Wayne, and now retired, she volunteers for the Tredyffrin-Easttown Historical Society on its Archive Committee.