Head of a Young Girl

Before Mary Cassatt settled in Paris for good, she spent the early 1870s teaching herself in front of old pictures. In Parma she studied the paintings of Correggio, in Seville she stayed for months working on Spanish subjects, and in Antwerp she looked closely at Rubens. This small head, about 32 by 23 centimetres, is dated to around 1874, the year she took a studio in Paris and began to make her life there. The girl is not named, and nothing is recorded about why the picture was painted. It came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1927, a year after Cassatt died in France at the age of 82.