Eddy Cassatt (Edward Buchanan Cassatt)

Eddy Cassatt (Edward Buchanan Cassatt) (1875, National Gallery of Art) is an early portrait of Cassatt's nephew, one of several family portraits from the mid-1870s that demonstrate her developing skills as an observational portraitist before her full immersion in Impressionism. The portrait of a child relative offered a natural opportunity to develop the psychological directness and informal compositional approach that would characterize her mature child portraiture. By 1875 Cassatt had spent years studying in Europe and was beginning to develop an independent artistic identity.

The early date suggests a more academically grounded technique than Cassatt's mature work — careful tonal modeling, more controlled brushwork, and greater emphasis on the specific features of the sitter. Nevertheless, the informal arrangement and psychological directness already anticipate her later child portraits.