MARY CASSATT: A LIFE, by Nancy Mathews, Villard Books, 383 pages, $28.

American artist Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) has earned the critics’ laurel for being “one of the best women painters of all time.” In this elegant biography, Dr. Mathews, pre-eminent authority on Cassatt, tears aside the veil of time and bids the reader to enter the life of this remarkable woman.

The second of four siblings born to a Pennsylvania family notable for its wealth and social prestige, Mary was next in line to Aleck, the eldest son, destined to become president of the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad. His sister, Mary, was obsessed with art. At 15 she enrolled in the celebrated Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At 21, tall and slim with disturbingly direct gray eyes, she made the daring decision to call Paris her permanent home. A footloose expatriate, she roved France, Italy and Spain in search of the finest teachers under whom to study.

Indifferent to sex, Cassatt defied the conventions in her own fashion by supporting women’s suffrage, staying a spinster, and in time settling down to a period of undreamed-of success with her paintings featuring the signature theme of mother and child. Her response to those who took exception to the effrontery of an unmarried artist focusing on this field was a shrug and the offhand remark that she preferred to paint children than to have them.

Possessed of a quick, sharp tongue, she once complained to a friend about Edgar Degas, who converted her to Impressionism, “… you don’t know what a dreadful man he is, he can say anything.” To which the friend shot back, “So can you.”

After a long, tumultuous, and distinguished career she died at 81, arthritic, blind and alone except for Mathilde Valet, her favorite servant-companion, at Beaufresne, her country chateau near Paris. “She was accorded a ceremonial funeral as befitted her rank as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. …”

As a young art student in Paris, Mary soon found out about the importance of having one’s paintings accepted by the Salon, whose annual exhibition was sponsored by the French government for the purpose of bringing such works to the attention of the public. She also learned that to get a painting entered, one had to curry favor with one’s teachers. Because she resisted the practice, it was not until she was 24 that her earliest documented painting, “A Mandolin Player,” was accepted by the Salon. But her independent stand brought punitive penalties. “For 10 years Cassatt submitted paintings to the Salon. Toward the end of that time. … as rejections grew more numerous … her mood grew blacker and more bitter,” writes Mathews. Then, abruptly, Lady Luck beckoned.

Edgar Degas, one of the leaders of a radical art group called Impressionists by the press, invited the 33-year-old Cassatt to exhibit in their show, along with such painters as Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Pissaro, Sisley and Morisot. Mary, who realized she had found her rightful niche, was ecstatic. Henceforth her paintings reflected the brighter palette, fresher style, and more sketchlike modernism of Impressionism; and seven years later she began her series of mother and child pictures, the cornerstone of her most enduring claim to fame.

This deeply detailed biography is a veritable Bayeux Tapestry of Cassatt’s conquest of her art. Illuminated with 130 black and white reproductions, along with photographs of family and friends, it is a riveting depiction of the pain and pleasure of one who was born to bear the burden of what the Queen Mother of England termed “an intolerable honor.”

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly feature in the Books & Music section.