Susan Seated in a Garden

For most of the 20th century this picture had no sitter's name attached. It was auctioned at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1891, reached the dealer Durand-Ruel in 1914, and was shown for decades as Fillette dans un jardin, a little girl in a garden. At a Paris exhibition of modern women artists in 1935 it hung as Woman in a Hat, and catalogues dated it anywhere between about 1881 and 1888. Today it is placed around 1881 to 1883, and the girl is known to be Susan, a cousin of Mathilde Valet, Cassatt's housekeeper. Cassatt liked to paint the people closest to her household, and in the early 1880s Susan posed for her many times, in bonnets, on a balcony, in the garden. The canvas sold at Christie's in New York in 2017 and was bought in 2023 for the collector Christian Levett, whose museum in Mougins reopened in 2024 as FAMM, devoted to women artists.