Girl Arranging Her Hair

Mary Cassatt made this to win an argument. Her friend and sometime rival Edgar Degas had needled her that women lacked style in art, and she answered by picking the least flattering subject she could: an ordinary girl in a plain shift, caught in the awkward morning act of pinning up her hair. There is nothing conventionally pretty about the face, the heavy jaw or the reddened skin. The appeal is meant to come from the handling alone, the drawing and the colour. She hung it at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in 1886, the last one the group ever held. Degas saw the point at once. He admired the picture so much that he traded her one of his own works for it and kept hers in his own collection.