Mary Cassatt, an American artist active in the 19th-century French avant-garde, completed the painting Child Picking a Fruit in 1893 during her stay in Paris. It is part of Cassatt’s mother and child works and depicts a natural and genuine love relationship between the two. The painting merges the subject of a young woman and child with the examination of “modern woman.” Cassatt’s meticulous and realistic depiction of the mother in a pink dress holding what appears to be her baby son is set against a green background. The artwork is located in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
Born into a comfortably upper-middle-class family, Cassatt traveled extensively through Europe as a child. Her family lived in France and Germany from 1851 to 1855, providing her with an early exposure to European arts and culture. Cassatt was a leading American artist in the impressionist movement of the 1800s. Young Woman Picking Fruit, also an 1891 painting in the impressionist style, is another depiction of a mother and child moment. Both paintings display a real and natural love relationship between the mother and child, themes frequently explored in Cassatt’s work.
