Little Girl in a Large Red Hat - Mary Cassatt, 1886

Cassatt painted this work in the mid-1880s, a period when her alignment with the Impressionist circle in Paris was at its most productive. Having exhibited in four of the group's independent exhibitions, she had by this point absorbed Degas's interest in asymmetric framing and Monet's commitment to optically mixed colour while forging a subject matter entirely her own: the private world of women and children observed without sentiment or condescension. Children in large decorative hats appear across her work of this decade, and the motif carries a double function: the hat provides a bold compositional anchor and a field of saturated colour while also situating the sitter within the bourgeois culture of dress and presentation that Cassatt both belonged to and observed with a painter's detachment. Works from this period were central to establishing her international reputation, and American collectors, encouraged by her dealer Durand-Ruel, began acquiring them steadily through the 1880s. The painting belongs to a body of intimate figure studies that critics now regard as among the most psychologically precise child portraits of the 19th century.