Child among the Hollyhocks

By 1881 Berthe Morisot had been showing with the Impressionists for years, one of the very few women in a circle the Paris critics still treated as a joke. The child here is her own daughter, Julie, not yet three, set down among the tall hollyhocks of the family garden. Morisot painted her fast, in thin strokes that let the bare canvas show through, so the girl and the flowers seem made of the same loose, unfinished light. She worked this way on purpose. Where a Salon painter would have tidied every edge, she kept the brush marks visible, the way you actually catch sight of a small child who will not hold still. Julie sat for her mother again and again over the years, and grew up to keep a diary about these afternoons.