Mrs. Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading

Cassatt lettered this small panel in its upper left corner, M.S. Cassatt, Paris, 1876. In those years a woman lost in a novel was a stock figure of suspicion. Flaubert's Emma Bovary, ruined by the romances she devoured, had been in print since 1857, and painters often showed the female reader as idle, drowsy or flirtatious. Mrs. Duffee is none of these. She sits on a sofa striped in orange, red and gold, her head propped in her hand against a cushion, and holds open a small book, probably a novel, with her eyes fixed on the page. Cassatt painted the dress and the face with close care and left the brown wall behind her in broad, loose strokes, so that the end of the sofa seems to melt into it. The sitter, Mary Duffee, kept the picture, and in 1894 it passed to her daughter.