Frau bei der Toilette

Morisot shows a young Parisienne at her dressing table, still in her earrings and a black velvet ribbon, reaching up to unpin her hair after an evening out. She painted it in the later 1870s and showed it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1880. What her fellow painters noticed was the handling: soft, feathery strokes of silvery grey and pink that turn the bedspread, the wallpaper and the woman almost into one shimmering surface. She even blurs the mirror so the reflection dissolves, quietly stepping around the old idea of a woman gazing vainly at herself. One critic wrote that her eye was more sensitive than that of Manet, her friend and brother-in-law, who had taught her much. Morisot was the only woman among the founding Impressionists.