Sara con cuffia scura, mano destra sul bracciolo

Cassatt spent the first months of 1901 travelling through Italy and Spain with her American friends Louisine and Henry Havemeyer, going from dealer to dealer and house to house and telling them what to buy. Several of the El Grecos and Goyas she picked out on that trip ended up in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She was 56 and had been steering American money towards European painting for 20 years.

Back at her house in the Oise countryside north of Paris she returned to what she did between such trips, which was painting the local children. A girl called Sara sat for her repeatedly that year, in one bonnet after another, sometimes with a dog, sometimes with her mother.

The picture is in Cologne, in the Impressionist collection the Swiss couple Gerard and Marisol Corboud placed with the Wallraf-Richartz Museum on permanent loan in 2001.