Portrait de Mary Cassatt

Two painters who spent their afternoons in one another's studios in 1880s Paris. Degas shows his friend Mary Cassatt, the American he had urged to exhibit with the Impressionists, leaning forward with a fan of playing cards in her hands, in plain dark clothes. It reads less like a commissioned portrait than one artist catching another mid-conversation. Cassatt sat for him willingly enough at the time. But she grew to dislike the result, and when it was sold decades later she asked that it not be identified as her, writing that she did not wish to be remembered looking as she does here.