Sita and Sarita

This is the painter's cousin, Sarah Allibone Leavitt, painted around 1893 or 1894 in a white dress on a blue and white patterned sofa, with a black cat perched on her shoulder, its yellow eyes level with her face. The title plays with Spanish pet names, Sarita for Sarah and Sita for the cat, at a time when Spanish painting, championed by Manet, was in fashion. The picture was shown in New York in 1895, and in 1896 in Paris, at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the newer of the city's two big annual exhibitions. In 1921 Beaux gave it to the French state for the Musée du Luxembourg, the Paris museum of living artists. Before it left she painted a second version, she wrote, for her own satisfaction, and that one is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.