“I love to paint children,” Mary Cassatt once said. “They are so natural and truthful. They have no arrière-pensée (ulterior motive).” The American-born Impressionist became one of the most influential artists of 19th-century France with her refreshingly tender portraits of mothers and children painted in loose, tactile brushstrokes. Among her most famous paintings is Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The painting shows a young, tired-looking girl slouching in a large floral blue armchair, a small Brussels griffon dog resting in a matching chair nearby. She wears a bored expression, her limbs sprawled over the chair in exhaustion or exasperation. This frank expression captures Cassatt’s modern, secular approach to portraying children.
This year marks the centennial of Cassatt’s death in 1926 at age 82. In response, many museums are honoring her life and work. The Musée d’Orsay is opening “Mary Cassatt: Being Independent” (“Mary Cassatt: L’Indépendante”) on October 6th, an exhibition of nearly 80 paintings, pastels, and prints. The exhibition will travel to Boston in 2027. Meanwhile, the Art Institute of Chicago is currently hosting “Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism,” which looks at her career in the years after the final Impressionist exhibition of 1886.
To mark the centennial of her life, we’ve taken a closer look at Cassatt’s celebrated Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.
Cassatt collaborated with Degas to create this iconic work
La Petite Danseuse de 14 Ans, 1881
Edgar Degas
Théo Landel
Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, to a wealthy American family. Initially, her parents resisted her ambition to become a professional artist, but by 1860, a teenage Cassatt had enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She moved to Europe in her twenties, eventually settling in Paris, where she would live for the rest of her life. Cassatt’s early works took inspiration from the Old Masters, whom she studied closely on painting trips through Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Over the years, however, her brushwork loosened and her palette brightened, and she began experimenting with the asymmetrical compositions and unconventional croppings influenced by the nascent Impressionist art movement and the dawn of photography.
By 1877, Cassatt’s works had come into open conflict with the French art establishment and the official Salon rejected both of her submissions that year. That rejection spurred Edgar Degas to invite her to exhibit with the Impressionists, an invitation she accepted. Degas’s friendship with Cassatt shaped Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. The girl in the painting was the daughter of friends of Degas’s, but his contribution extended far beyond that.
“It was the portrait of a friend of M. Degas,” Cassatt wrote to the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1903. “I had done the child in the armchair and he found it good and advised me on the background and he even worked on it.” Recent cleaning and infrared imaging at the National Gallery of Art have since confirmed his work on the canvas. Scholars believe Degas most likely reworked the oddly shaped patch of floor between the chairs and the play of light through the windows, and his influence has been traced through the painting’s asymmetrical composition, its bold pattern, and its tight, cropped framing—a debt to the Japanese prints he introduced Cassatt to.
The little girl enacts a rebellion against adult society
The psychology of the painting, however, is quintessentially Cassatt’s. The girl becomes an agent of disorder and rebellion in the tidy adult world she inhabits. Her body sprawls diagonally across the blue-and-white floral chair, cutting against the orderly lines of the upholstery. Her expression sits somewhere between boredom and open irritation, her gaze drifting sideways toward the little dog curled up in the matching armchair beside her. Her look might be one of envy. The dog, unlike her, is unencumbered by expectations. The girl is painted, not in a nursery where she might be at ease, but a fashionable drawing room, the domain of adult women. The girl fidgets under the constraints. Feminist writer Germaine Greer called the painting Cassatt’s “first real stunner,” which she saw “as an icon of the awfulness of being at once controlled by adults and ignored by them.” The composition reinforces this sense of claustrophobia, with chairs pressing in from every side. The girl’s averted gaze here becomes an assertion of her own independence—an autonomy Cassatt celebrates.
The painting caused a controversy when it debuted
Afternoon Tea Party, 1991
Mary Cassatt
Canopy Gallery
In the Omnibus, 1991
Mary Cassatt
Canopy Gallery
Cassatt took an interest in the lives of women and children well beyond the canvas. She was a feminist from an early age and spent her career depicting the “New Woman” of the 19th century. These women went out in society, receiving guests, going to the theater, and conquering the modern world on their own terms. Cassatt was one of these women as well. “I am independent!” she once declared. “I can live alone and I love to work.” Cassatt, unlike many of her era, did not reserve that sense of self-possession for adults. Art historian Griselda Pollock has called Little Girl in a Blue Armchair one of the most “radical” images of childhood because of its lack of sentimentality.
But Cassatt’s frank depiction of childhood also put off viewers acclimated to more idealized imagery. She submitted the painting to the American pavilion at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair, and its jury rejected it. The decision infuriated Cassatt, particularly because Degas had worked on it. “I sent it to the American section of the big exposition, they refused it,” she wrote to Vollard. “I was furious, all the more so since he had worked on it. At that time this appeared new and the jury consisted of three people of which one was a pharmacist!”
Cassatt never knew what had turned the jury off of the work, but in the nearly 150 years since its creation, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair has earned a much warmer reception. The painting entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in 1983, and has remained one of the most popular works at the museum since.
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