Portrait of a Young Woman in a White Hat

In 1879 Mary Cassatt showed her work for the first time with the Impressionists, at their fourth exhibition in Paris. An American who had trained the respectable way and then walked away from it, she had been pulled into the group by Edgar Degas, who admired her drawing. This portrait comes from those years. It is a plain bust of a young woman in a white feathered hat, the face done carefully and the hat and background brushed in fast and loose, the way the group liked. We do not know who she was. Cassatt rarely named the girls and women she painted, and this one has stayed anonymous ever since she first set the white hat against the dark ground.