Le Cerisier

Berthe Morisot spent the summer of 1891 at a rented house in Mezy, a village on the Seine outside Paris, and set out to paint the most ambitious canvas of her life. A cherry tree stood in the garden, and she put her daughter Julie up a ladder to pick the fruit, with Julie's cousin Jeannie steadying a basket below. Morisot was around 50, one of the very few women at the center of the Impressionist circle, and she worked at this slowly, making a small oil study and several drawings before carrying the composition back to Paris. There she kept reworking it for nearly two years, and because Julie was rarely free to pose, a professional model took the girl's place on the ladder. She was still at work on it while her husband, Eugene Manet, was failing. He died in 1892, and Julie, the child in the tree, was not yet 14.