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trusted adviser of great collectors, and an artist of absolute first rank.
Mary Cassatt was a Philadelphian whose father’s fortune was in railroads. When she was twentythree and rather bored with drawing casts at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (young ladies were not often allowed to draw from the life model at that time, or, if they were, the model wa* masked!) die told her family die intended to go to Paris to study. Her father said to her, “I would rather see you dead," but go she did and in a few years she was one of the very few pupils of Degas. By 1874 die had exhibited in the Salon, by 1878 she had begun to buy from the Impressionists for her own collections and in 1879 Degas put her work in the 4th Impressionist Exhibit.
She exhibited again in the 5th Impressionist Exhibit and the 6th Impressionist Exhibit. By 1881, Mary Cassat had found her favorite subjects which were those she had used in the paintings die sent to die 6th Impressionist ^Exhibit— women and children, interiors and garden scenes. "The Banjo Lesson,” a purchase for the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from-the Williams Fund, it such a printing, or rather pastel, for like her master, Degas, she worked in both oils and pasteis.
It was painted about 1894 and is a brilliant statement of a fleeting moment of childhood concentration. It is not known who the models were, but there is a striking resemblance between the child and the 18% portrait of Electra Havemeyer, the daughter of one of the two collectors for whom Miss Cassatt acted as adviser. Mary Cassatt' and Mrs. Henry O. Havemeyer had been childhood friends and while Mrs. Havemeyer was only twenty-two and studying in Paris, die was guided in the purchaes of a Degas (for only $100.00) by Mary Cassatt.
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