The Tea (Le Thé)  1880

Signed lower left: Mary Cassatt [br]M. Theresa B. Hopkins Fund Cassatt’s paintings often document the social interactions of well-to-do women like herself. The activities they depict—tea drinking, going to the theatre, tending children—fall within the normal routine for Cassatt’s sex and class. Yet the painter’s insistence upon representing such episodes from the modern...