“Lilacs in a Window”
“Lilacs in a Window” is an oil on canvas painting by the American Impressionist artist, Mary Cassatt. It was painted sometime between 1880 and 1883.
After having limited success as a woman artist trying to exhibit at the Paris Salon, Mary Cassatt displayed her work at the Impressionist exhibitions from 1879 to 1886. She became good friends with Berthe Morisot, another woman artist, and became one of its leading members.
Though Cassatt was an avid lover of flowers, she rarely did still life pieces, opting instead for figures as the focal subject. This painting was originally owned by one of Cassatt’s close friends and earliest patrons, Moyse Dreyfus, the art collector whose portrait she painted in 1879. Dreyfus was related to Alfred Dreyfus of the notorious “Dreyfus Affair” that divided France in the late nineteenth century.
“Lilacs in a Window” is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the United States.
For more on Mary Cassatt, please visit her short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.