Portrait of Louise-Aurore Villeboeuf as a Child

By 1902 Mary Cassatt had spent nearly 30 years in France, the one American who showed alongside the Impressionists in Paris. In her late 50s she was working more and more in pastel, and more and more on children, and this is one of them, a small Parisian girl named Louise-Aurore Villeboeuf. Cassatt drew her in soft chalk on beige paper and let the warm tone of the sheet show through the pale, frilly dress and the chair behind her. She rarely prettified the children she drew. She watched how a real one sits and fidgets and looks back at the adult across from her. Within about a decade her eyesight would fail and the pastels would stop. This sheet came to the Musee d'Orsay as a gift in 1978.