Mary Cassatt's elder sister, seven years her senior, who lived with her in Paris from the mid-1870s and sat for many of her paintings and prints. She had Bright's disease, a kidney illness, and died in November 1882 at forty-five.
Painting
A woman holds the reins and a whip and looks straight ahead down the road. A small girl sits beside her, looking elsewhere. Behind them both, turned away, sits a groom whose face is barely visible. Mary Cassatt painted her sister Lydia driving in the Bois de Boulogne in 1881, and the painting has been at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1921.
Sat for a portrait by · 1878–1881
Lydia sat for her sister repeatedly between the late 1870s and 1881. Museums name her as the sitter in Automne at the Petit Palais, which Mary Cassatt gave to the museum herself in 1922, in Lydia at a Tapestry Frame at the Flint Institute of Arts, in Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the print Lydia and Her Mother at Tea at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Depicted in · 1881
The Philadelphia Museum of Art identifies the woman holding the reins as Lydia Cassatt, the artist's sister. The family had bought a small carriage and a horse called Bichette in 1879, and the sisters drove together in the park.
Sat for a portrait by · 1878–1881
Lydia sat for her sister repeatedly between the late 1870s and 1881. Museums name her as the sitter in Automne at the Petit Palais, which Mary Cassatt gave to the museum herself in 1922, in Lydia at a Tapestry Frame at the Flint Institute of Arts, in Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the print Lydia and Her Mother at Tea at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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