Children in a Garden (The Nurse)

Children in a Garden (The Nurse) (1878, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) depicts children supervised by a nurse in a garden setting, introducing an explicit reference to the domestic service that enabled bourgeois family life. The presence of the nurse as a compositional element distinguishes this work from Cassatt's mother-and-child paintings and places it in the broader social observation of Impressionism's documentation of class and domestic economy. The garden setting allowed her to explore the Impressionist challenge of outdoor light and figures.

The garden environment provides Cassatt with the characteristic challenge of outdoor light modulating across figures and foliage. The nurse's darker, more conventionally rendered figure serves as a compositional anchor against which the lighter, more freely painted children are set. The palette captures the greenery and light of a summer garden.