Three Women with Parasols

Paris in 1880 was in the grip of a fashion for everything Japanese, and one of the people who had done most to start it was the painter's own husband, the printmaker Félix Bracquemond, among the first in France to champion Japanese prints. The woman in the middle here holds a dark folded fan of the kind that craze made fashionable. She and her companions walk toward us under a red parasol and a white one, in the ruffled, close-fitting summer gowns of that season. Marie Bracquemond built the whole surface from short, crossing strokes, so the dresses, the sky and the path seem woven from the same shimmering stuff. The picture is often nicknamed The Three Graces, after the goddesses of classical art. The critic Gustave Geffroy owned it and left it to the French state in 1926.