Margot Lux, a dark-haired child, posed for Mary Cassatt on many occasions. Here, she joined Reine Lefebvre (later Madame Pinault), a woman from the village near Château de Beaufresne, the seventeenth-century manor house at Mesnil-Theribus, Oise, that the artist bought in 1894. Reine Lefebvre later recalled posing between 1901 and 1903. The setting in this work is probably the conservatory of the manor house. Numerous studies exist for this work. Cassatt also made a closely related drypoint etching of the subject.

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