The Hydrangea

Berthe Morisot painted this in 1894, what turned out to be the last full year of her life. She died the following spring at 54. It shows two young women seated beside a hydrangea in bloom, and one of them is her daughter Julie Manet, then in her teens. The picture carries two titles, The Hydrangea and The Two Sisters, though the young sitters were in fact close relatives rather than sisters. By this point Morisot had been exhibiting with the Impressionists for 20 years, and a critic that same year counted her among the leading women of the movement. She keeps everything here quiet and domestic, the brushwork loose and pale. The flowering hydrangea at their side gives the work its gentler name.