Young Mother Sewing

Around 1900 a mother-and-child portrait was still expected to be posed and composed, the sitters aware of the painter. Cassatt threw that out. She paints a woman absorbed in her sewing while a small girl slumps sideways against her knee and stares straight out, completely at ease, as if no one had asked her to hold still. The two weren't even related. Cassatt hired separate models and put them together. Her friend Louisine Havemeyer, who bought the picture in Paris in 1901, loved exactly this truthfulness, the way the child has flung herself against her mother with no thought of being in the way. Havemeyer left it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1929.