Woman in a Garden

Download1686 × 2256 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 123 × 94 cm (48 1/2 × 37 in.); Framed: 153.7 × 123.9 × 12.1 cm (60 1/2 × 48 3/4 × 4 3/4 in.)
Museum: Art Institute of Chicago
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

This work was probably begun in the summer of 1882, when Berthe Morisot and her family rented a house in Bougival, a picturesque village along the Seine River in northern France. Morisot spent the season there with her husband, Eugène Manet (artist Édouard Manet's brother), and their nearly four-year-old daughter, Julie. The child wearing a straw hat in the background of this painting is likely based on Julie, while the identity of the main figure is unknown.

Morisot applied paint as if she were making a landscape in the Impressionist style, slashing acid green pigments and bluish ochers across the canvas to transcribe the effects of dappled sunlight without differentiating between the strokes used for the figure and setting.

Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0.