About this work
*Portrait of Mlle C. Lydia Cassatt, The Artist's Sister* was created in 1880 in the Impressionist style, executed in oil on canvas.
Lydia is set outdoors, wrapped in coats and warm layers against the autumn cold, wearing a black bonnet tied at the neck with a ribbon hanging onto her chest.
She sits on a bench surrounded by trees, wearing a colorful warm coat, and holds a cane in her lap.
Lydia's coat shares the autumnal colors of the background, yet reads brighter against it — as if the artist is seeking to preserve in pigment a vitality that was already beginning to slip away.
The vibrantly patterned coat is rendered with Cassatt's highly visible, energetic brushstrokes — the same loose, feathery touch that animates the foliage behind her and blurs the boundary between figure and season. Lydia's face is noticeably paler than her hands, and her outfit, as pretty as it is pragmatic, features a series of horizontal patterns in a variety of colors that animates the overall surface.
The Cassatt family stayed together at Marly-le-Roi in the summer of 1880 through mid-October, and the painting was exhibited at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881 under the title *Autumn*.
During the late 1870s and early 1880s, the subjects of Cassatt's works were her family — especially her sister Lydia — along with the theater and the opera.
Lydia, who was frequently painted by her sister, had recurrent bouts of illness, and her death in 1882 left Cassatt temporarily unable to work.
From the series of Lydia portraits, it is clear that Mary Cassatt was grappling with a subject seldom addressed by the Impressionists in their paintings — human mortality.
Taking care of her sister allowed Cassatt to develop a deeper intimacy with the vulnerable body and honed her eye to recognize corporeal traces of disease; her educated gaze rendered Lydia's skin almost translucent. These images serve as a precursor to a remarkable shift in her subject, marking a turning point in her career when she began to paint pictures of children held by their caregivers.
When Mary Cassatt later donated the painting to the Petit Palais, she gave it the title *Portrait of a Woman* — a quietly protective gesture that shielded her sister's identity from the public eye.
As a print, this work earns its place in rooms that can hold
