Little Girl in a Large Red Hat,

ca. 1881

When the renowned feminist art historian Griselda Pollock (b. 1949) wrote of Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Large Red Hat, she used unusual words— “powerful confrontation”—to describe the encounter between artist and child that resulted in the painting. The phrase underscores how Cassatt’s comprehension of her young subject as an individual of depth and interiority differed from prevailing Victorian views of children, particularly girls, as devoid of contemplation and inner life. Even the artist’s Impressionist peers, considered paragons of modernity, often reduced children to decorative elements in their compositions. It was left to Cassatt to discern some- thing more in representing the stage of life now understood as crucially formative. Cassatt’s arresting painting, at once probing and appealing, is among the most accomplished “confrontations” with what would become her signature subject: children, often female, in various modes of engagement with adults in the bourgeois milieu of the artist and her friends and family.