Mère et enfant (Le miroir ovale)

Mary Cassatt was an American who had made her career in Paris among the Impressionists, and by 1899 she had settled on the subject that would define her, mothers with their children, painted without the sentimentality the theme usually invites. Here a woman holds a sturdy naked boy against her, her cheek near his head. Behind them an oval mirror catches the back of his head and rings it like a halo, and the pose, the tenderness, the boy's twisting stance all recall Italian Renaissance pictures of the Madonna and Child. Degas noticed at once and told her, half teasing, that it was the infant Jesus with his English nurse. The collectors who bought it, the Havemeyers, simply called it the Florentine Madonna.