Portrait d'une petite fille

1879 was the year Mary Cassatt threw in her lot with the Impressionists. An American from Pennsylvania who had settled in Paris, she had grown tired of the official Salon, and when Edgar Degas invited her to show with his independent group instead, she accepted, the only American to exhibit with them. She painted this small portrait of a young girl that same year, in the loose, bright touch she had taken up under their influence, far from the polished finish the Salon expected. It is an ordinary sitter rather than a commission, the kind of quiet domestic subject Cassatt would make her life's work. The canvas is now in the museum at Bordeaux.