About this work
Cassatt's *Self Portrait* is one of two known self-portraits she made — the more widely reproduced being the c. 1880 gouache and watercolor held at the National Portrait Gallery. Here is the product description:
Cassatt turns her gaze directly back at the viewer — unhesitating, composed, and utterly in command. Fashionably dressed, she nonetheless refuses the passive role that fashionable dress was meant to signal.
She is not content to be admired; she returns the viewer's gaze and, by concealing her sketching surface from view, playfully reverses expectations — it is the artist who is doing the appraising.
Strokes of green in the right background suggest wallpaper, while a wash of rich yellow at the left evokes sunlight pouring over the artist's shoulders and casting her face into shadow.
The bold strokes emphasize color, mood, and motion, celebrating her rapid touch and the modernity of her style.
Cassatt created this watercolor around 1880, a year after she began exhibiting with the French Impressionists — and it reads, in part, as a statement of arrival, addressing her role as a professional artist at a pivotal moment.
Under pressure from her father to cover her studio costs through sales, Cassatt applied herself rigorously in this period, and the self-portrait stands among her most accomplished works of 1878, alongside *Little Girl in a Blue Armchair* and *Reading Le Figaro*.
It is one of only two known self-portraits she ever made, and the influence of Degas is visible in the unusual sage-green background, the attention to contrasting complementary colors, and the figure's daring, asymmetrical pose. That she painted so few images of herself makes this one all the more charged — a rare instance of Cassatt turning her formidable powers of observation on herself.
The painting reflects her professional status and her defiance of societal norms — qualities that translate directly into its presence on a wall. This is a work for rooms with strong natural light, where its interplay of shadow and warm yellow can shift across the day. It suits a study, a library, or a well-considered living room: anywhere a sense of quiet authority is welcome. The viewer who responds to it tends to be someone drawn less to decoration than to character — to the feeling of being in the presence of a fully realized mind. It doesn't so much fill a wall as hold its ground on one.
