Mary Cassatt's "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair," painted in 1878, remains one of the most radical depictions of childhood in art history, according to art historian Griselda Pollock — a reputation built on the child's refusal to perform sweetness for the viewer. The girl sprawls across an oversized blue armchair in a white dress with a tartan sash, one knee splayed, gaze averted, embodying an autonomy that Cassatt celebrated in her subjects. The painting's frankness initially put off contemporaries. Cassatt submitted it to the American pavilion at the 1878 Paris World's Fair, and its jury rejected it — a decision that infuriated the artist, particularly because Edgar Degas had advised on and even painted parts of the background. Cassatt never learned what exactly had repelled the jury, but in the nearly 150 years since, the work has earned a far warmer reception and entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it has been a favorite since its arrival. Cassatt spent her career depicting what the era called the "New Woman" — independent, socially engaged, conquering the modern world on her own terms — and refused to reserve self-possession for adults. Where idealized imagery of childhood typically offered sentimental miniature adults, Cassatt's girl is slumped, bored, and disengaged, watched over by a small dog equally at ease in a neighboring chair. The article frames the painting as emblematic of Cassatt's feminist vision from an early age. Her declaration — "I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work" — extended, in Pollock's reading, to her young sitters, who were granted the same unselfconscious inner life as her adult subjects.