Jeanne Fourmanoir sur le lac

In 1892 Berthe Morisot was having a hard year. Her husband Eugène Manet, brother of the painter Édouard Manet, died that spring, and the same season she opened the first solo exhibition of her life. Somewhere in those months she painted this: a young woman in a white dress and green hat, seated in a boat on a lake in the Bois de Boulogne, watching a swan glide past. The model was Jeanne Fourmanoir, a professional who also sat for Renoir. Morisot was in her early fifties and near the end of her own life. She would die in 1895, and you can feel it in the handling, the loose, quick strokes that leave the water and the dress half-dissolved. The picture stayed in private hands until 2023, when a New York sale sent it to a museum in Mougins, in the south of France.