Child in a Straw Hat

A wide straw brim tilts above a small face, while two hands meet low in front of a pale grey-blue dress. Against a nearly bare background, these few elements give Mary Cassatt’s Child in a Straw Hat its structure. The hat reaches outwards; the arms narrow inwards; the eyes look slightly aside.

The National Gallery of Art dates the oil on canvas to about 1886. Its accession number is 1983.1.17, and its recorded overall dimensions are 65.3 × 49.2 cm, separate from the frame. The museum’s credit is the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. The child is unnamed in the record. ^[1]

A brim that changes the balance

The hat is much wider than the child’s head. Its long brim stretches across the upper part of the portrait, rising towards the right as we see it. That slant immediately complicates the otherwise upright arrangement of the body.

The crown is lower and more compact than the brim. A checked band separates the two, its dark and light pattern gathered into an irregular shape near the top. The hat is therefore not one uninterrupted yellow area. Brim, crown and band have different boundaries, textures and directions.

Short light touches run along parts of the straw edge. Broader strokes describe the underside above the face. Their variety helps suggest a manufactured object without requiring every strand of straw to be separately painted. At the far left, the projecting brim makes the child’s head appear smaller beneath it.

The brim also creates an asymmetry. It reaches farther into the surrounding space than the shoulders do. The face sits below that tilted span, while the body returns towards a more vertical arrangement. The large accessory supplies movement to a pose with very little overt action.

A face looking slightly aside

The head tips a little beneath the hat. Hair falls beside the cheeks and neck, with lighter strokes separating it from the subdued background. The eyes turn towards the right of the image rather than meeting the viewer directly.

Pink cheeks and reddish lips give the face a stronger warmth than the dress. The mouth is closed, its edges defined by only a few changes of colour. Around the eyes, small darker marks do work that the larger hat and garment accomplish through broad shapes.

This concentration of information makes the face worth returning to after looking at the brim. The hat announces itself through scale and direction; the face demands closer attention. A slight shift of an eye or mouth matters because the surrounding figure is relatively still.

The gaze does not identify an object outside the picture. Nor does it disclose the child’s relationship with Cassatt. A viewer can recognise the slight turn and the set of the mouth without knowing the sitter’s name, age or circumstances.

Pale sleeves and a grey-blue pinafore

The light clothing is divided into different kinds of surface. Short pale sleeves project from either side of the central garment. Their broad, uneven brushmarks differ from the longer downward strokes across the pinafore.

At first the dress can seem to be a single grey area. Looking longer reveals cooler and warmer passages within it, along with light marks that suggest folds. The central verticals lead the eye down from the neck towards the joined hands.

The sleeves widen the silhouette near the upper arms. Below them, the bare forearms angle towards one another. This creates a simple sequence: shoulders, projecting sleeves, sloping arms, then the smaller cluster of hands. The garment is important because it makes those changes in width easy to see.

Colour also separates the figure from the setting without using a hard dark border everywhere. The sleeves are lighter than the background; the dress is cooler; the forearms are warmer. Different edges can remain soft while the whole pose stays legible.

The costume does not establish that the child had just been dressed for a particular outing. Its pictorial function is clearer than its occasion. It lets Cassatt place warm skin and straw against subdued clothing, keeping the face and hands distinct within a limited setting.

The hands hold the lower composition together

The hands meet near the bottom edge, with one taking hold of the opposite wrist. The arms do not hang as two unrelated verticals. They make a shallow enclosing shape across the front of the body.

This contact gives the lower part of the portrait a focus. Without it, attention might move from the face down the broad dress and leave the image without another point of concentration. The joined hands gather the longer arm and garment lines into one compact area.

Their treatment is economical. Changes of flesh colour indicate fingers and the turn of a wrist without making the hands more detailed than the face. Their position is easy to understand even though the lower edge brings the body close to the limit of the canvas.

The arrangement can feel restrained, but restraint is a quality of the visible pose before it becomes an account of emotion. Joined hands do not prove obedience, frustration or an instruction given during a sitting. They supply a relationship among the arms that the viewer can follow directly.

A background made useful by its simplicity

There is no elaborate room behind the child. The grey-green field contains visible vertical brushwork and small variations of tone, but little that identifies a specific interior. The figure does not compete with furniture, wallpaper or a landscape view.

The background is not inactive, however. Its quieter colour makes the straw brim and pale sleeves more conspicuous. Its vertical movement also differs from the diagonal hat and forearms. These relationships give the open areas a role without turning them into represented objects.

The spaces beside the head are unequal because of the tilted brim. Farther down, the wider sleeves and narrowing arms change the shape of the surrounding ground again. Looking at those spaces helps reveal the figure’s construction: the portrait is organised through intervals around the child as well as marks within the body.

The absence of a detailed setting leaves the costume and posture to carry most of the encounter. It also limits what can be said about place. A plain background cannot establish a studio address, a household or the sitter’s social identity.

Direct paint handling and the idea of speed

The National Gallery describes the painting’s direct handling as alla prima, drawing attention to its broad visible strokes. That is an object-specific curatorial account of how the oil was painted. It does not provide a measured duration for the sitting or prove the absence of every revision. ^[1]

The visible marks help explain the impression of directness. The sleeves contain broad strokes whose edges remain apparent. The dress is described through long changes of colour rather than a seamless polished surface. On the brim, separate touches provide the effect of straw and light.

These different marks are selective. The face uses smaller adjustments than the sleeves, while the background can tolerate broader vertical passages. An appearance of spontaneity consequently rests on decisions about where to concentrate description and where a larger stroke can suffice.

Speed of appearance and time of execution are different questions. A line can look swift without telling us how long Cassatt considered its placement. The painting offers evidence of visible handling; a story of a single uninterrupted session would require further documentation.

Is the child bored?

The museum reads the expression as suggesting boredom and frustration and places the painting among Cassatt’s images of girls apparently playing dress-up. Those are interpretations of the image, rather than the child’s recorded testimony. ^[1]

Several visible features can support such a response: the closed mouth, the slightly averted eyes, the still arms and the disproportionate span of the hat. Yet those features can also prompt quieter descriptions, such as reserve or distraction. A useful reading acknowledges the pose while leaving room for that uncertainty.

The picture does not need a definite psychological diagnosis to hold attention. The tension between the broad tilted brim and the contained body already supplies an expressive contrast. The paint can appear active while the child remains relatively still.

The title is helpful in its restraint. It identifies a child and an article of clothing rather than naming a feeling. Looking can begin with those shared facts before moving towards more personal interpretations.

Collecting history: purchase and gift

The National Gallery traces the painting through Ambroise Vollard, Chrétien de Gallea and Edward Speelman before Paul Mellon’s purchase in January 1965. Its account qualifies the earlier inheritance information as supplied by Speelman. The museum gift followed in 1983. ^[1]

The purchase and gift are distinct events. The first concerns Mellon acquiring the work; the second concerns its entry into the national collection. The accession number should not lead a reader to assume that he first bought the canvas in 1983.

The earlier names also do not supply a complete chronology by themselves. Without exact transfer dates, they cannot establish where the painting was in every intervening year. A provenance list is most useful when its qualifications remain attached to the entries that require them.

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Cassatt’s 1878 oil in the same museum, distributes a child’s body very differently. The seated girl spreads her legs across the chair, with one arm raised behind her head. Patterned blue upholstery occupies much of the room. ^[4]

The comparison begins with posture. The straw-hat child’s arms converge towards joined hands; the reclining girl’s limbs extend in several directions. One pose is relatively narrow, the other expansive. Both become legible through the space available around the body.

The settings strengthen the difference. Several chairs, a dog and a richly marked floor complicate the earlier painting. In Child in a Straw Hat, a nearly bare field leaves the isolated figure to establish the principal directions.

These are separate solutions to representing a child, rather than two illustrations of an identical mood. The same word, such as boredom, can conceal the different relationships among body, furniture and image boundary. Comparing the actual arrangements gives a more precise account of what each painting does.

Ellen Mary in a White Coat

Ellen Mary Cassatt in a White Coat offers another contrast in clothing. The oil of about 1896 belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Victoria’s loan-exhibition label identifies its sitter as Cassatt’s two-year-old niece. That family identification belongs to Ellen’s portrait and does not identify the child in the straw hat. ^[15]

Ellen’s pale coat spreads broadly across a chair, with dark trim giving it a conspicuous edge. Her arms reach out towards the chair’s sides. A tall bonnet extends the costume above her head, whereas the straw hat projects mainly sideways.

Both paintings make clothing larger than the visible face, but the shapes direct attention differently. Ellen’s coat and outstretched arms widen the seated body. The straw-hat child’s sleeves widen only the upper part, after which the forearms turn inward towards the hands.

The contrast makes the accessories more than charming details. Bonnet, brim, trim and sleeve help establish the scale and direction of each figure. Cassatt can give a small child considerable pictorial presence through the relationship between a body and what it wears.