About this work
*Woman in a Black Hat and a Raspberry Pink Costume* was created in 1900 and stands as one of the most vivid examples of Cassatt's gift for the single-figure portrait. The work is a pastel on paper — and the title is essentially the entire composition: a well-dressed woman commands the picture plane, her deep black hat anchoring the top of the frame while the warm, saturated raspberry of her costume radiates outward against a quieter ground. In many of Cassatt's portraits of upper-class women, the sitters wear their best hats and dresses, and this figure is no exception — her costume features a bow, frills, buttons, and a belt. The contrast between the darkness of the hat and the warm intensity of the pink is deliberate and arresting, doing the work that words like "raspberry" promise: something between red and pink, fruit-bright and alive. The entire paper is filled with pastel, but Cassatt leaves many of the strokes wide and unblended to create the Impressionist sense of motion and capture the play of light.
The painting arrived at a pivotal juncture in Cassatt's career. Around 1900, she had reached the height of her public reputation — her work was widely collected and critically admired — but the radical energy of her earlier Impressionist years was giving way to something more ruminative. An increasing sentimentality is apparent in her work of the 1900s; her work was popular with the public and the critics, but she was no longer breaking new ground. Within this context, the single-figure portrait offered a space for sustained, intimate observation. Cassatt was one of the most inventive practitioners of Impressionism in many media, and not least in pastel — a newly popular medium in the late nineteenth century.
As a dry medium, pastel was an ideal means to express the Impressionists' new emphasis on spontaneity; as an opaque medium, its distinctive reflectance responded to the era's fascination with the scintillating effects of natural light. Cassatt also had a personal stake in depicting women like this one: she highlighted the agency, intellect, and inner lives of women by showing them deeply engaged in their pursuits. The painting was later included in a 1915 suffrage exhibition organized with art collector and friend Louisine Havemeyer, featuring works by Cassatt and Degas.
On the wall, this is a painting that rewards proximity. The raspberry-to-black interplay generates warmth without sweetness — it holds its own in a room with natural light and equally holds its ground against darker walls, where the pink seems to push forward into the space. It speaks to a viewer drawn to portraiture with psychological weight, to the suggestion of a person rather than a type. The figure makes no obvious gesture toward the viewer, and that self-possession is the point: here is
