Le Bain

Cassatt was 66 when she painted this, and it is among the last large compositions she finished. The scene is thought to come from the pond at her country house north-west of Paris, the Château de Beaufresne. Two young women sit in a boat with two naked children ready for a swim, and the women's bathing robes came from Paquin, one of the big Paris couture houses, which gave her the colour she wanted. A buyer appeared within weeks. Ernest Stillman, the son of a New York banker, had settled in Paris and asked Cassatt what he ought to collect. He took this from the Durand-Ruel gallery in November 1910, and it reached the Petit Palais in 1923. Cataracts were closing down her eyesight by then, and she had given up painting around 1914.