On a bench in the Bois de Boulogne

In March 1896, a year after Berthe Morisot died, the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel filled his Paris gallery with her work, with a catalogue preface by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. This small canvas hung there as number 326. She painted it in 1894 in the Bois de Boulogne, the big park on the western edge of Paris. Two girls in straw boaters sit close together on a bench, one in a dark jacket, the other in pale lilac, and behind them the path breaks up into quick, blurred strokes where other walkers go by. The picture later belonged to Ernest Rouart, the painter who married Morisot's daughter Julie, and then to Nadia Boulanger, the composer and famous music teacher. Boulanger left it to the state by word of mouth, and it entered the national collections in 1980.