Women and children first

A lady licking an envelope. An intimate thing. It might be only the bill from the coal-man she’s paying, but it has the feel of something else: an assignation, a confession, an apology, a breaking-off. Would this woman in her deep-blue day dress and jacket be so unguarded if the artist had been a man? Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) was a femme sérieuse who painted women of quick wits and tender instincts. No grubby models, no ballet rats, no laundresses, no absinthe. Her sitters, you feel, would write a thank-you note, send flowers, recommend a dressmaker.

Mary Cassatt: An American Impressionist in Paris, at the Musée Jacquemart-André, is the first French exhibition to be dedicated to the Pittsburgh-born painter since her death. Cassatt moved to Paris from Philadelphia in 1865. She was an outsider twice over: a woman and an American. Still, she had taste, money, family, ambition, an apartment near the Place Pigalle and, after the success of the impressionist exhibitions, a château outside Paris.