The Artist's Sister at a Window

In 1869 the two Morisot sisters had just been pulled apart. Edma and Berthe had trained together, painted side by side, expected to become artists together, and then Edma married a naval officer, Adolphe Pontillon, and put her brushes down for good. Berthe painted her that year seated at an open window, a colourful fan in her hands, her eyes resting on it rather than on us. Edma was expecting a child when she posed. The sisters' letters from these months keep circling the same loss: one of them still at the easel, the other now a wife far from Paris. Berthe kept working, and within a few years was exhibiting with the painters soon called Impressionists. Edma never really returned to painting.