American Art Collaborative

As her career unfolded, American expatriate Mary Cassatt became the preeminent painter of the domestic sphere, in which women and children dwelled. Yet in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when she was working closely with the French master Edgar Degas, she devoted her attention to the theme of a fashionable woman (often modeled by her sister, Lydia) in a box seat at the theater. The Cassatt family frequented the theater, and for a single, well-heeled lady in Paris these forays allowed Cassatt the rare opportunity to capture subjects from the modern urban scene.