Mary Cassatt was born at Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh), in 1845. She was the daughter of a prominent businessman and spent much of her childhood in France and Germany. In 1858 her family moved to Philadelphia and two years later she commenced study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After the Civil War she studied briefly in Paris with the official Salon painter, Charles Chaplin. In 1870, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, she returned to the United States, but was back in Europe two years later. As early as 1874 she became aware of a struggling group of French painters, then rejected by Salon juries, but who would eventually be called "impressionists." Cassatt understood their creative premise and developed an enthusiasm for their work. She became a close friend of Edgar Degas, who in 1877 invited her to join and exhibit with the group. (She subsequently also showed works in the major impressionist exhibits of 1879, '80, '81, and '86.) Undeniably her work was influenced by Degas and his marginally impressionist style; she never totally adopted the strict application of color theory and divisionist brushwork technique employed by the more doctrinaire impressionists like Monet and Pissarro.

In 1890, the same year the charming pastel Baby Bill in Cap and Shift, Held by His Nurse is believed to have been drawn, Cassatt attended the great exhibit of Japanese printmaking at the École des Beaux-Arts. She was deeply impressed with the subtle abstract beauty she saw. Much of her work in the succeeding several years consequently took on a pronounced oriental effect: flat decorative patterning, carefully calculated asymmetry, and a delicate linear outlining of form. In fact, Baby Bill may well represent a pivotal piece in the artist's increasing comprehension of such design modes. While the sketch seems fresh and spontaneous, in keeping with the artist's developed impressionist manner, at the same time it manifests characteristics that suggest she had already assimilated some of the Japanese sense of rendering and pictorial arrangement. The dark-eyed, chubby infant is set out from the nurse and surrounding spaces by rather accentuated contour outlining. The swath of yellow-green along the right edge is an important element for balancing the composition, both in terms of its inherent visual weight and attraction and as a counterpoint, that is, as the hue complement to the warm pinkish glow of the two subjects' fleshtones. On the other hand, these same skin tones, in accord with typical impressionist color usage, are composed of various carefully juxtaposed shades -- shadows of blue and green that impart unusual vibrancy.

The Hunter's piece, moreover, is a delightful example of the theme that most of Cassatt's best-known works express: the tender relationship between mother (or in the case of an upper-class household, the nurse) and child. It is an iconographic type, with considerable religious precedent and residual overtone.

Cassatt continued to draw and paint well into the twentieth century, though in the later 1880s her work gradually grew, as David W. Scott suggests, "drier in technique and less imaginative in concept." At the same time she began having problems with her eyesight. Her vision degenerated to a state of nearly total blindness over the last ten years of her life. She died in France in 1926.

Though she spent most of her professional life in Europe and was an admitted expatriate, Cassatt always considered herself fundamentally American in outlook and personality. As such, her importance as an American artist cannot be overlooked. She was the first American to become associated with the impressionist movement. What is more, she was the most avant-garde American woman artist of her era.