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Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878
Oil on canvas; 35 1/4 x 51 1/8 in. (89.5 x 129.8 cm)
Fourth Impressionist exhibition, 1879
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon 1983.1.18
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Committed to painting contemporary life in a modern manner, Cassatt composed an insistently candid domestic scene. In a room stuffed with brightly upholstered furniture, a child—the daughter of friends of Degas—sprawls indecorously on a chair, her skirt drawn up and her bloomers showing. Cassatt's Brussels griffon rests on a chair at the left. Cassatt was enraged when the jury for the American section of the 1878 Exposition Universelle rejected her unconventional composition. She showed it the following year, when she debuted with the Impressionists.
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