In the Loge

Cassatt painted this work in 1878, during the period when she had begun to align herself formally with the Impressionist circle around Edgar Degas, who had invited her to exhibit with the group the previous year. The subject of women at the opera was itself a pointed choice. In Paris and Boston society alike, the theater loge was one of the few public spaces where a respectable woman might appear unescorted, and the opera glasses were a charged object: a tool of looking in an era that policed what women were permitted to look at. Cassatt subverts the passive female gaze by giving her subject the glasses and the authority to use them. A nearly identical compositional device appears in a Renoir from the same year, and Cassatt's version is widely considered the more psychologically acute of the two. The painting entered the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it has long been recognized as one of the defining works of American engagement with French Impressionism, and one of the earliest major paintings to center a woman as an active, outward-looking subject rather than a decorative presence.