Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly

Mary Cassatt

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this luminous Impressionist oil painting, Mary Cassatt depicts her sister Lydia seated in a walled garden at Marly-le-Roi, west of Paris, absorbed in the act of crocheting. Lydia is fashionably dressed in a blue day dress with plaid and lace trim, topped by a large white bonnet, set against a backdrop of orderly rows of coleus plants in rich greens and purples. Painted with the loose, sunlit brushwork characteristic of Impressionism, the composition draws the eye directly to Lydia's figure, who appears serenely unaware of the garden surrounding her. As the only American artist officially associated with the French Impressionists, Cassatt was at the height of her engagement with genre scenes of everyday domestic life when she completed this work, which was subsequently exhibited at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881.