Young Girl Reading - Mary Cassatt
Archival giclée
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Description
A delicate pastel portrait by Mary Cassatt, depicting a young girl lost in the quiet concentration of reading.
Mary Cassatt, an American painter who spent much of her career in France, produced this work during her later period. She often focused on the domestic lives of women and children, capturing quiet, private moments with a focus on psychological interiority. In this pastel, the subject is a young girl absorbed in a book, her posture relaxed and her gaze directed downward. The medium of pastel allows for a soft, luminous quality, which Cassatt uses to build form through layered, hatched strokes rather than rigid outlines.
The composition is straightforward, placing the figure centrally against a simple background. The girl wears a light blue garment, which contrasts with the darker tones of the chair and the book she holds. Cassatt employs a palette of soft blues, greens, and warm flesh tones, creating a sense of calm. The light appears to emanate from the left, illuminating the girl's face and the texture of her clothing.
Cassatt was closely associated with the French Impressionists, particularly Edgar Degas, who encouraged her interest in pastel. This work demonstrates her technical proficiency with the medium, showing how she could achieve both delicate skin tones and more robust, expressive marks in the clothing and surroundings. The lack of extraneous detail ensures the viewer remains focused on the girl's concentration. By choosing to depict a common, everyday activity, Cassatt elevates a mundane scene into a study of character and light. The work remains a representative example of her ability to observe her subjects with both empathy and formal rigour, avoiding sentimentality while maintaining a focus on the human experience.
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Because every print is made to order, we don't offer change-of-mind returns, refunds or exchanges. If your order arrives faulty, damaged or incorrect, we'll replace it free of charge — just contact us within 48 hours of delivery. See our refunds page for full details.
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Manufacturing
Each print is produced to order using 12-colour giclée printing on FSC-certified archival paper. Designed in Britain and printed at your nearest production hub to reduce waste and speed up delivery.
Care and materials
Specific Features
Every Solis piece is made to order with archival, gallery-quality materials built to last.
- Museum-grade giclée printing for rich, fade-resistant colour
- Archival matte fine-art paper, FSC-certified
- Multiple sizes and framing options available
- Frames in black, natural wood, dark wood or white
- Framed prints arrive ready to hang
Care & Cleaning
To keep your artwork looking its best:
- Dust gently with a soft, dry cloth
- Avoid prolonged direct sunlight
- Never use liquid cleaners on the print or canvas surface
- Keep in a dry, room-temperature space
- Handle prints with clean, dry hands
Materials & Sizing
Museum-grade giclée on FSC-certified archival matte paper, with framed and canvas options.
- Paper sizes: A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 and B2 (50×70 cm)
- Canvas: XS (20×30 cm) to Large (60×90 cm)
- Frames: black, natural wood, dark wood or white
Young Girl Reading - Mary Cassatt
Artist Biography
Mary Cassatt
She grew up in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), in a prosperous family. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she found the instruction restrictive and the male students hostile. She moved to Paris in 1866, copied old masters in the Louvre, and studied privately with several painters before finding her direction with the Impressionists.
Her subject was women and children in domestic settings: mothers bathing infants, women reading, girls at the opera, women having tea. The subject matter sounds conventional. The treatment is not. She observed her subjects with the same unsentimental attention Degas brought to dancers. The compositions are cropped and angled, influenced by Japanese prints and by Degas's habit of painting people from unexpected viewpoints. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) shows a child sprawled across a chair with the boredom and physical abandon that adults rarely notice and painters rarely record.
She never married. She was wealthy enough not to need to sell her work. She used her position and her connections to persuade American collectors, particularly the Havemeyers, to buy Impressionist paintings. The Havemeyer collection, much of it acquired on Cassatt's advice, was donated to the Metropolitan Museum. She shaped the taste of American collectors more than any other single individual.
She developed cataracts and was nearly blind by 1914. She stopped painting. She died in 1926, at eighty-two.
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