A Cassatt Pastel Takes Its Place in Paris
Mary Cassatt stands among the most important American artists of the nineteenth century, transforming familiar scenes of women and children into images of remarkable sensitivity and sophistication.
M.S. Rau recently sold Mary Cassatt’s Girl with a Banjo to the Musée d’Orsay, after curator Caroline Corbeau-Parsons encountered the pastel at The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF Maastricht) last spring. The work now joins the museum’s permanent collection and will be featured in Mary Cassatt: Being Independent, a major exhibition marking the centenary of her death.
Its move from M.S. Rau to the Musée d’Orsay gives the pastel a new public life. Long admired as a rare Cassatt work in private hands, Girl with a Banjo now becomes part of a larger museum narrative around the artist’s legacy, seen in the city where she spent much of her career.
Girl with a Banjo Is More Than a Charming Cassatt
Cassatt made ordinary female experiences feel fully observed and artistically complete. In Girl with a Banjo, a seemingly charming subject became a statement about modern American womanhood.
Girl with a Banjo by Mary Cassatt. Circa 1894. M.S. Rau (Sold).
By the late nineteenth century, the banjo had moved from folk tradition into fashionable American parlors, where it became linked with the leisure and musical accomplishment of modern young women. Rather than place the sitter with a more familiar sign of refinement, such as the piano or harp, Cassatt chose an instrument that was socially relevant and distinctly American.
That context connects the pastel to one of the most ambitious projects of Cassatt’s career. In the early 1890s, she explored images of women playing the banjo in relation to Modern Woman, her mural for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. In a mural devoted to women’s education and progress, the banjo-playing figure made those ideas visible through an ordinary act of practice and accomplishment.
Cassatt was American-trained, yet she spent much of her career in Paris, absorbing ideas from the artists around her while maintaining a vision decidedly her own. That balance makes Girl with a Banjo especially compelling within the Musée d’Orsay’s Being Independent, an exhibition centered on the independence that shaped Cassatt’s life and work.
The Moment Not to Miss
Set inside the Musée d’Orsay’s grand former railway station, Being Independent brings together nearly 80 paintings, pastels and prints, including rarely seen works from European collections and American works seldom shown abroad. The exhibition considers Cassatt across the full reach of her career.
Musée d’Orsay, Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, 75007 Paris. 2023. Source.
That transatlantic scope gives Girl with a Banjo particular relevance. The pastel brings together a distinctly American subject, Cassatt’s Paris career and the period of Modern Woman, when she was developing her most ambitious ideas about women’s education and progress.
From New Orleans to Paris, Girl with a Banjo now takes its place in a major celebration of Cassatt’s legacy. For visitors to the Musée d’Orsay, the pastel offers a rare view of the artist at a pivotal point in her career.
Mary Cassatt: Being Independent is on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 6, 2026, through January 31, 2027.
