桟敷席にて

A woman leans forward at the theatre, her opera glasses raised, absorbed in watching something across the hall. Look to the upper left and a man in another box has turned his own glasses not on the stage but on her. Cassatt painted this in 1878, the year after the painter Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists in Paris. She dressed her woman in plain black at a daytime performance rather than a glittering evening one, and gave her the active role, the one doing the looking. It became the first of Cassatt's Impressionist paintings shown back home in the United States. A Boston critic, startled, wrote that her painting surpassed the strength of most men.