Unique in the history of American art, Mary Cassatt was the only American accepted as a member of the French Impressionists. An innovative and fiercely independent woman with a determined spirit, she arrived in Paris to study with the great artists of the time, and immediately formed a friendship with her instructor, Edgar Degas, who invited her to exhibit with the Impressionist group. Along with Degas, Cassatt took up printmaking in the 1880s, concentrating on domestic scenes of women and children, though she herself never married or had children of her own. Technically, Cassatt owed a great debt to the influence that Japanese prints had on her own work in terms of line, color, scale and subject. In all, she created more than 200 graphic works, abandoning the medium when failing eyesight forced her to do so.