Sara Handing a Toy to the Baby

Mary Cassatt settled permanently in France in the 1870s when she was in her 30s. There she became friends with Edgar Degas and the Impressionists and exhibited with them in four of their eight Impressionist exhibitions held from 1874 to 1886 – the only American artist invited to do so, and one of very few women. After 1900, Cassatt became known primarily as a painter of mothers and children engaged in domestic activities and casually presented, as opposed to formally posed. In this painting, Cassatt employs compositional techniques used in Japanese prints, such as cropping both sides of the picture to give the viewer a glimpse of an intimate moment.