Little Girl in a Blue Armchair

Cassatt painted this in 1878, the year she threw in her lot with the Impressionists in Paris, and her friend Edgar Degas actually worked on it with her, advising on the room behind the child and even painting some of the background himself. The girl sprawls sideways in a big blue armchair, bored and slightly cross, with the family dog asleep beside her, a pose no polite portrait of a child would have allowed. Cassatt sent it to the American section of the 1878 World's Fair in Paris, and the jury rejected it, which left her furious, all the more so because Degas had had a hand in it. Years later she blamed a jury that included, of all things, a pharmacist.