Winter

In April 1880 the Impressionists held their fifth group show in Paris, and Morisot sent a pair of half-length women, each standing for a season. This is Winter. Its partner, Summer, is now in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. A season shown as an elegant woman was an old idea, and critics duly compared her to Fragonard. The collector Charles Ephrussi, a noted connoisseur of 18th-century French art, bought Winter that same year. The woman herself is dressed for 1880, in a fur hat, a white scarf with a spray of red flowers at her throat, her hands buried in a dark muff. Within a year or two Manet, Morisot's brother-in-law, painted his own pair of seasonal women, Spring and Autumn. No document says he was answering her, though an exhibition in San Francisco in 2025 hung all four side by side.