In the wheat

Gennevilliers, just across the Seine north-west of Paris, was still open farmland in 1875, and the family of Morisot's new husband, Eugène Manet, owned property there. That year she painted the plain several times. Here she sets the horizon high and builds the picture in bands, a strip of trampled path, a broad field of ripe wheat, a low line of houses and trees, and a pale sky. On the horizon factory chimneys send up smoke, a sign of the industry that was already spreading out from the city across these fields. A boy in a straw hat stands in the wheat with a bundle over one shoulder. The canvas stayed with Morisot's family after her death in 1895, and in 1901 her heirs sold it to the Durand-Ruel gallery, which had shown it in her memorial exhibition five years before.