American Art Collaborative

Mary Cassatt created paintings, drawings, and prints that communicate the lively impermanence of her subjects, who were often members of her own bourgeois family. Although she never married and devoted herself to her career, she also fulfilled a role that society expected of her—living with and caring for her elderly parents and chronically ill sister, Lydia. In The Stocking Cassatt depicted a squirming child on the lap of her maid, Mathilde. The woman pulls a stocking onto the child’s chubby foot, while the child reaches for something beyond the edges of the picture. Cassatt noted to a friend that the baby was holding her hand out toward a parrot—the same bird pictured in the adjacent drypoint, The Parrot.