Breakfast in Bed

By 1897 Cassatt was 52 and spending most of the year at Beaufresne, an old château north-west of Paris she had bought three years earlier out of her own earnings as a painter. Pictures like this one look like family, which is the thing most people get wrong about them. Cassatt had no children. The women and children she painted were hired models, usually neighbours from the villages nearby, brought in for the morning and paid for the day. What held her attention was the mechanics of it. The child is already awake and looking out into the room while the woman holds on and watches. Almost everything in the picture is white, down to the cup and saucer on the tray that gives the painting its title.