Around 1900, Mary Cassatt added a new type of composition to her repertory: the young girl seated, sometimes with a dog. Many of the girls, as in Simone Seated on the Grass Next to Her Mother, wear elaborate chapeaux. Inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish portraits as well as English portraits of the Romantic period, Cassatt updated the genre. While the old master images depicted aristocratic children, Cassatt often drew her models from the families of local servants. Nevertheless, she instilled her sitters with a strong sense of presence and dignity, in keeping with her belief that education and cooperation among women could shape destiny as much as inherited position.