Young Woman in a Black and Green Bonnet, Looking Down,

ca. 1890

One of America’s leading expatriate artists, Mary Cassatt settled in Paris in 1874, where she was greatly influenced by the pastels of her friend and mentor Edgar Degas. Pastel was described as Mary Cassatt’s "specific genre" in a review written in November 1889, by which time she had mastered the exacting technique of drawing with colored chalk, fully exploiting the medium’s painterly and spontaneous qualities. In this superb example, she depicts a seated, fashionably dressed woman with arm bent and elbow resting on the back of a cushioned chair. Cassatt’s bold strokes on the bonnet and colorful upholstery enliven these inanimate surfaces and offset the higher degree of finish on the woman’s face. The work relates to two others in which the identical model is shown arranging the veil of the black and green bonnet or sewing. Here, the focus is entirely on her pensive state. Since she is shown with hat and gloves, the environment is ambiguously public. This is neither one of Cassatt’s contemplative women reposing at home, nor one of Degas’s female subjects posing before the mirror at the milliner’s. While Cassatt’s sitters typically avoid the viewer’s gaze, here the total concealment of the woman’s eyes by her bonnet pays deference to her psychological privacy.