Perhaps the most successful female impressionist, and as good or better than many of her male contemporaries.

Mary Cassatt was relegated by gender norms to painting quaint domestic scenes rather than the interiors of brothels, or trekking about the countryside doing landscapes. In consequence, she’s destined to be a favorite on saccharine Hallmark cards. Mary may have counterbalanced this restriction by insisting that her subjects always be as candid and unglamorous as possible. To capture this natural effect, she preferred ordinary housewives and children to professional models.  This woman is most likely a neighbor from her bourgeois suburb outside Paris.

You may think this sunflower getup is from Mayim Bialik’s Blossom wardrobe, but it’s actually haute couture.  You see, Mary’s idea of not glamorizing subjects was dressing them up in gowns from Paris’s hottest dressmakers...but if ‘50s TV taught us anything, housewives always put on Christian Dior to do the ironing. This was before Coco Chanel brought the chic to French fashion, so instead of the little black dress, they had the big (oh, so big) yellow sunflower.

Mary also gives us a little added creep factor by having the naked child make awkward eye contact with the viewer in the mirror.  Art historians never shut up about the importance of the fetishization of female eye contact in the male gaze.  If we give credence to such theories, then somebody call Ice-T, ‘cause we got a special victim up in here.

Some pretty cool people have owned this over the years, including Louisine Havemeyer and Chester Dale.  Louisine was a close friend of Mary Cassatt and a badass suffragette who went to jail for blocking traffic, starved herself in protest, and even tried to burn an effigy of President Wilson in front of the White House.  Chester Dale was a semi-professional athlete and investment banker who started his career on Wall Street when he was just 15, and donated his magnificent art collection to the National Gallery of Art, where this painting currently hangs.