Banks of the Seine

In the early 1880s the riverside village of Bougival, just west of Paris, had become a summer gathering place for the Impressionists, and Berthe Morisot spent several seasons there. One morning in 1883 she carried her paints out into a boat on the Seine and worked straight from the water as the sun came up. Behind the railing on the quay her small daughter and the other children lean out, watching her paint. The strokes are fast and left unfinished on purpose, chasing the way dawn shifts across the river before the light settles. Morisot worked looser and rougher than most of the men she exhibited alongside, and here that speed does the work, holding one passing moment of morning on the water.