Junge Frauen beim Obstpflücken

In 1892 Mary Cassatt took on the largest commission of her life: a mural, twelve by fifty-eight feet, for the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. She called it Modern Woman, and its central panel showed young women gathering fruit from a tree. This canvas grows out of that idea. Cassatt said the tree was the tree of knowledge, and the women reaching for its fruit stood for their wish to be taken seriously, to share in learning and public life. It was painted just as American women were pressing hard for exactly that. The mural itself is gone; the building was pulled down after the fair and the painting lost with it. Easel pictures like this one are the nearest thing we still have to it.