Femme au zinnia rouge

Mary Cassatt was the rare American, and one of the very few women, welcomed into the French Impressionist circle by Degas in the 1870s. By 1891, when she painted this, she was at a turning point: the year before, she had seen a huge exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris, and their flat colour and quiet everyday moments were reshaping her art. You can feel it here in the calm, absorbed pose of the woman, one hand to her cheek, the other lifting a single red zinnia into view, her plain dress set against a simple band of grass. Cassatt gives an ordinary garden moment the weight the age usually saved for grander subjects. The picture reached Washington through the collector Chester Dale, who left it to the National Gallery in 1963.