Julie Daydreaming

Berthe Morisot painted her daughter Julie over and over, something like 150 times, from infancy on. This one comes near the end. It is 1894, Julie in her mid-teens, her chin resting on her hand, gazing at nothing in particular. The girl had lost her father two years earlier, Eugene Manet, the brother of the painter Edouard Manet, and the mood here is quiet and inward rather than sunny. Within a year Morisot herself would be dead, of a lung illness she caught while nursing this same daughter, and Julie was left an orphan at 16.