Little Girl in a Blue Armchair

Mary Cassatt painted this in Paris in 1878, the year after Edgar Degas invited her to join the independent group of artists who had broken away from France's official state exhibition and were becoming known as the Impressionists. The child who sat for it was the daughter of friends of Degas. Cassatt did not finish the picture alone: in a letter written in 1903 she recalled that Degas approved of the figure, advised her on the background, and then worked on it himself. Technical examination at the National Gallery of Art has since confirmed that a second hand is present in the paint. Cassatt had intended the painting as her serious entry to the American section of the 1878 Paris World's Fair, and she was angered when the selectors rejected it. She made her debut with the Impressionists the following year, showing eleven works in their 1879 exhibition. Cassatt was born near Pittsburgh in 1844, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and then settled permanently in France, becoming the only American artist to exhibit with the Impressionist group in Paris. She spent much of her career on subjects drawn from women's private daily life, and she later used her connections among American collectors to bring major French paintings into collections in the United States.