Summer

Morisot had shown at every Impressionist exhibition since the first one in 1874, and she missed only one, in April 1879, because her daughter Julie had been born the previous November. She painted this that year and sent it to the next exhibition, in 1880, where several critics complained that her canvases looked like sketches somebody had forgotten to finish. A young woman in white sits in front of an open window with her hat and parasol on her lap. The flowering shrub outside comes through the opening into the room, and the blossom and the trimming on her dress are put down with the same strokes, so there is no clear line where the garden stops. In 1907 Julie, by then married to the painter Ernest Rouart, gave the picture to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier.