In the central panel of Modern Woman, women gather fruit in a garden and pass it to young girls. The scene represents knowledge being acquired and shared. On either side, young women pursue fame, while others practise art, music and dance. Together, the three panels portray modern women through what they learn and do.
Mary Cassatt accepted the commission in 1892 for the Woman’s Building at the Chicago World’s Fair. An American painter based in France who had exhibited with the Impressionists, she was taking on a monumental work unusually large for her.
Making it required practical ingenuity. Cassatt worked in the greenhouse of a rented manor house in the Oise region of France. She had a trench dug so the canvas could be lowered, allowing her to reach its upper sections without painting from the top of a ladder. A system of pulleys helped move the triptych, which she completed in six months.
The response in Chicago was mixed. Its vivid colours drew criticism, while those who had commissioned it appreciated its modern character. Cassatt’s attention to women’s place in society continued beyond the fair: in 1915, she worked with the collector Louisine Havemeyer on a New York exhibition to raise funds for the women’s suffrage campaign.
The triptych itself disappeared after the fair. Photographic reproductions preserve its composition, and some of its elements appear again in pastels, paintings and colour prints in which Cassatt continued to explore them. These works make it possible to follow the subjects beyond the Chicago commission.
Those surviving records and works will bring Modern Woman into Mary Cassatt. L’indépendante, a retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay from 6 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. The museum will show prints and pastels connected to the triptych, alongside a film that digitally reconstructs its appearance. Visitors will be able to consider the missing decoration in relation to Cassatt’s surviving work and the course of her career.
The Chicago commission and the suffrage exhibition were different undertakings, more than twenty years apart. Seen together, they reveal a lasting concern in Cassatt’s work: women’s opportunities to gain knowledge, develop their abilities and take part in public life. In Modern Woman, that concern took monumental form for the visitors to a world’s fair.
- Musée d’Orsay
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture
- Musée d’Orsay, versione inglese della pagina della mostra
- Connaissance des Arts
- Library of Congress Mary Cassatt American Treasures
- Library of Congress Gathering fruit
- Les Amis de Mary Cassatt The Château de Bachivillers
