Mother Combing Sara’s Hair c. 1905 - 1915

Mary Cassatt made this pastel drawing, Mother Combing Sara’s Hair, at some point in her career as an American expatriate artist living in France. Cassatt was one of a very few women accepted into the Impressionist group of artists. And as a woman, she was expected to paint women – preferably in domestic settings, in keeping with the social norms of late 19th century Europe and America. But within this limitation, Cassatt subtly challenged the existing social norms by painting women as individuals with their own interior lives. In this work, she draws our attention to the intimate exchange between mother and child. Both figures are completely absorbed in the simple, everyday ritual of combing hair. To understand this work better, historians might investigate etiquette manuals from the time, in order to learn more about how these social relationships were codified, and how that code was expressed in the art world.