Artist Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844, in Allegheny City (present-day Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania. Cassatt was one of seven children born into an upper-middle-class family. They moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania and later Philadelphia, where Cassatt first attended school at the age of six. Cassatt’s family encouraged world travel, so she spent five years in Europe, visiting London, Paris, and Berlin, among other places. She had some of her first art and music lessons there, which set her on the course to become an artist. While her family didn’t like the idea of her becoming an artist, she attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when she was 15.