Sommertag

Two women sit in a rowing boat on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, the big park on the western edge of Paris. A generation earlier the Bois had been a royal hunting forest. Napoleon III had it remade into a landscaped park for ordinary Parisians to stroll and boat in, and by the 1870s a Sunday out here was exactly the kind of modern leisure the Impressionists loved to paint. Morisot lived nearby. Look at how she paints the water, quick zig-zag strokes that never quite settle, so the surface seems to shift under the boat. One of the women looks off to the side, the other straight past us. A few ducks cut across the foreground. She showed it in 1880 at the fifth Impressionist exhibition.