Woman in a Garden

Bougival, on the Seine west of Paris, was known to painters as a river resort. Renoir and Monet had set up beside its bathing place in 1869, and the Sunday trains kept bringing crowds down to the water. Morisot rented a house there with her husband and small daughter for the summers from 1881 to 1884, and in 1882 she stayed most of the year. What she painted was almost never the river. It was the garden behind the house, which was large and full of flowers, and the same few people sitting in it. Here a woman is in a dark blue dress with white at the collar and cuffs and a hat trimmed with flowers. The canvas is over a metre tall, big for Morisot, and it was probably begun in that garden in the summer of 1882 and finished the year after.