午後5時のお茶

By 1880 Mary Cassatt was an American living in Paris and the only United States painter invited to show with the French Impressionists. Here she paints something she knew from the inside, the afternoon call, when well-off women received visitors over tea. Notice how much room the silver tea service takes up. Its polished pot and tray sit right at the front, arguably more commanding than the two women behind them, and Cassatt catches one guest mid-sip, her face half-hidden by the raised cup. That was a deliberate refusal of the polite portrait, where the face is meant to be the point. When the picture was shown, even critics who usually found Cassatt difficult gave in, and the novelist Huysmans called it simply an excellent canvas. The engraved silver was the Cassatt family's own service, carried over from Philadelphia.