Girl in the Garden

In May 1886 this canvas hung on the rue Laffitte in Paris, at the eighth and last of the Impressionist group exhibitions. The group was coming apart by then. Monet and Renoir stayed away, and in a separate room Georges Seurat showed his large Sunday on La Grande Jatte, painted in tiny dots of colour, for which the critic Félix Fénéon soon coined the name Neo-Impressionism. Cassatt's picture belongs to the older way of working. A young woman in a pale dress bends over her sewing in a garden, beds of red flowers around her, the brushwork loose and quick. Nobody knows who she was. The French national collections database lists her simply as an unknown woman at needlework, and the painting is dated only to between 1880 and 1882. The collector Antonin Personnaz bought it from Cassatt herself, and it came to the French state with his bequest in 1937.