Young Woman Sewing in the Garden

Cassatt painted this work around 1880, during the period when she had become the only American artist invited to exhibit with the French Impressionists, joining the group's exhibitions from 1879 onward at the invitation of Edgar Degas. The subject, a middle-class woman engaged in a domestic craft in a private garden, sits squarely within the Impressionist program of recording modern bourgeois life with unposed immediacy. Cassatt's handling here is characteristically hers rather than Degas's: where Degas favored the diagonal and the cropped silhouette, Cassatt centers her figure with a frontality that is almost monumental, letting the brushwork of the garden carry all the restlessness. The painting belongs to a sequence of garden and sewing subjects Cassatt explored in the early 1880s, works that argued, through their very ordinariness, that the interior lives of women were as worthy of sustained attention as any grand subject from history or myth. That argument was not yet obvious in 1880, which is part of why these pictures still have force.