With its probing depiction of its sitter’s mental state, the painting exemplifies Morisot’s sensibility.
Berthe Morisot is the best-known of the female Impressionists, having been given a solo retrospective that traveled Europe and North America starting in 2018. Born in 1841, Morisot first showed at the age of 25 at the 1864 Paris Salon. Morisot was the only woman invited to show in the first Impressionist exhibition (formerly called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Printmakers) in 1874, and she went on to participate in all but one of the eight exhibitions between from 1874 to 1886. She was close with Manet, even marrying his brother, and the two influenced each other, in a way that ultimately moved her work in bolder, more abstract directions. She painted with loose, bold brushstrokes that emphasized expressivity over naturalism. A critic wrote at the time, “Her painting has all the frankness of improvisation; it truly is the impression caught by a sincere eye and accurately rendered by a hand that does not cheat.” In the The Garden at Maurecourt (ca. 1884), she depicts a mother gazing at her child with little sentimentally, perhaps even boredom or exhaustion. With its probing depiction of its sitter’s mental state, the painting exemplifies Morisot’s sensibility. Morisot died of pneumonia in 1895, at the age of 54, leaving behind an oeuvre that hints at the further breakthroughs she was poised to make.