Mary Cassatt’s older brother Alexander was, during his lifetime, the famous Cassatt.

As the president of the Pennyslvania Railroad, which was the largest rail company at the time, he was the 19th and 20th century’s version of Elon Musk. He did daring and expensive experiments like build the first train tunnels into Manhattan and buy French art at a time when Americans only liked landscapes of the Hudson River Valley. Well ok, Elon would have done one of those things.

Aleck and Mame (affectionate sibling pet names) were close, so in his desire for Mary to succeed as he had, Alexander used his influence to bring both Mary’s and her impressionist peers’ paintings to America. Not that Mary had nothing to do with her brother’s altruism, she played with his love of horses to introduce Alexander to contemporary painting, first showing him Degas’ jockey scenes. He was down for the horse paintings and soon moved onto collecting works by Monet and Berthe Morisot.

Alexander was the only American buying contemporary French paintings at the time, and for a while his homes were the only place to see them on this side of the ocean. But his celebrity and the lemming-like tendencies of the robber baron class meant that Alexander’s well-heeled cohorts were not far behind, buying on-themed impressionist paintings for their own homes. They saw the pictures at a party and just knew that their great room had to have one. It didn’t hurt that the impressionist program of depicting contemporary life was a good complement to their train-fueled egotism.

Like her shrewd inclusion of horses in Alexander’s “Art Hist. 206: Intro to Impressionism,” Mary definitely knew whom and how to flatter. She painted her brother a number of times and while he did have to spend 28 hours sitting for this one it still probably felt like a gift. Sort of a thank you from the future-famous sibling to her celebrity brother for introducing all of his rich co-workers to her poor, starving-artist friends. He knew how to do trains and she knew how to get remembered.