The Cradle

In the spring of 1874 a group of painters the official Salon kept rejecting rented the old studio of the photographer Nadar and mounted their own show. It is the exhibition we now call the first Impressionist one, and among the works on the wall was this quiet scene of a woman beside a cot. Berthe Morisot hung it there as the only woman in the group, and by doing so became the first woman to exhibit with them. The sitter is her own sister, Edma, watching over her sleeping baby, Blanche. Look at Edma's raised arm and the baby's small arm below it, one echoing the other, and the thin gauze she has drawn across the cradle. That veil sits between us and the child, so we are kept a step back, allowed to watch but not to intrude. Morisot painted her family often, and this was the first time motherhood appeared in her work, a subject she would return to for the rest of her life.