Lady at the Tea Table by Mary Cassatt in the Metropolitan Museum, December 2008

Artist: Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)

Title: Lady at the Tea Table

Date: 1883–85

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 29 x 24 in. (73.7 x 61 cm)

Credit Line: Gift of the artist, 1923

Accession Number: 23.101

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/americ...

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This work, one of Cassatt's most famous paintings depicts Mrs. Robert Moore Riddle, a cousin of the artist's mother. Edgar Degas considered the work to be the very essence of distinction, but the sitter did not care for it. Cassatt rediscovered it almost thirty years later when her friend, the American collector, Louisine Havemeyer convinced her to rummage "through all the store closets in her apartment and into the big chest in the corridor" for pictures that could be lent to a New York exhibition benefitting women's suffrage. Cassatt agreed to send Lady at the Tea Table, but cautioned, "I wonder if anyone would care for it at the Exhibition. I doubt it." To her surprise, it was a critical success. She presented it to the Museum eight years later.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.