Works by Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot painted the people of her daily life, among them her sister Edma and her daughter Julie, very quickly, in light strokes and with a great deal of white.

Morisot destroyed nearly all she had painted before 1869, the year of The Harbor at Lorient: a young woman in white sits on a quay wall under a pale pink parasol, with still water and moored ships behind her. Following Corot, she had taken to working out of doors. At the first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874, she was the only woman showing, and she stayed with the group, missing only the 1879 show, after Julie's birth.

Critics described her touch with the French verb effleurer, to brush against. In Woman at Her Toilette, seen at the 1880 show, a woman with her back to us lifts a hand to her hair, still wearing her earrings and a black ribbon; the mirror that should give back her face is a haze of grey strokes, with the artist's signature along its foot. Around that year she began painting on unprimed canvas. She often left the edges of a picture unfinished, so the bare cloth shows.

After 1885 drawing took a larger part, and in her last years she squared up her drawings and used tracing paper to move them onto the canvas exactly. The pastel Young Girl Holding a Basket, from 1891, on pink paper that glows between the strokes, is a study of her niece Jeanne Gobillard for The Cherry Tree, where the girl holds up her basket to another on a ladder in the branches.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Musée Marmottan Monet.