Child Picking a Fruit by Mary Cassatt - 1893 - 100.33 × 65.41 cm Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Child Picking a Fruit by Mary Cassatt - 1893 - 100.33 × 65.41 cm Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Child Picking a Fruit

oil on canvas • 100.33 × 65.41 cm
  • Mary Cassatt - May 22, 1844 - June 14, 1926 Mary Cassatt 1893

It's Sunday and so it's time for a work from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  : )  Enjoy!

Child Picking a Fruit merges the subject that made Mary Cassatt famous—a young woman (possibly a mother) and child—with her more ambitious examination of “modern woman,” a topical theme at the turn of the 20th century as the women’s suffrage movement gained momentum. The image derives from the artist’s now-lost Modern Woman mural commission, produced for the Woman’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For this prestigious world’s fair, Cassatt presented her allegorical subject in a three-panel lunette. The large central panel, Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge, featured women of different ages, clad in contemporary dress and communally harvesting fruit from an orchard.

Mary Cassatt is one of the artists featured in our Mega Impressionist Course; check it out here, it's super interesting!

P.S. Here you can read about Mary Cassatt’s unknown feminist mural that has gone missing.