The Musée d'Orsay opened its autumn season on 6 October with 'Mary Cassatt, L'indépendante', on view until 31 January 2027. Some eighty paintings, pastels and prints, several of them rarely shown, trace the full arc of the American artist's career — the first retrospective the museum has ever devoted to her, and the first major Paris showing since the Musée Jacquemart-André eight years ago. Cassatt, born in Pennsylvania in 1844 and settled in France from 1865, remains the only American to have exhibited alongside the Impressionists from 1874. She quickly earned the respect of a deeply male-dominated circle, holding her own beside Degas and Monet. Specialising in portraits, she painted the wealthy milieu she inhabited with unflinching intimacy, above all scenes of mothers with children that refuse all sentimentality. She was also a woman of conviction: a pioneering feminist who used her influence to campaign for women's suffrage, convinced their voices would shape the destiny of nations. The exhibition's centrepiece is a full-scale digital reconstruction of her lost 4-by-18-metre mural 'Modern Woman', made for the Woman's Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and now disappeared. Curator Anne Robbins notes that Cassatt is far less present in Orsay's own holdings than fellow 'ladies of Impressionism' Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond — a gap rooted in history. After her death in June 1926, no fewer than seven memorial exhibitions were staged in the United States while France simply forgot her. The show argues that this forgetting was France's loss. A chronologically arranged route, fed by exceptional loans from American and European museums, presents an heiress who was fiercely independent beneath her grand-bourgeois exterior. Full admission is €16, with free entry for under-18s and under-26 residents of the EEA.