Girl Arranging Her Hair

Girl Arranging Her Hair records one of the private, unposed rituals of everyday life that Mary Cassatt made her special province as an American painter among the Impressionists in Paris. The subject of a young woman busied with her own grooming is treated with the intimacy and the careful organization that distinguish Cassatt’s work of the 1880s, and the picture long commanded such respect that it was at first mistaken for the hand of Edgar Degas, her friend and most exacting critic. It is one of several canvases in which she raised a casual domestic action into a modern subject of remarkable formal poise.