Young Girl in a Low-cut Dress, a Flower in her Hair

Morisot painted this in 1893, two years before she died, when she was the grande dame of a movement that had once been a scandal. She had been the only woman to show in the first Impressionist exhibition back in 1874, and by the 1890s her closest painter-friend was Renoir, who often came by and traded ideas with her. The sitter here is a girl called Marthe, caught in Morisot's late manner, loose and quick, the brush leaving the canvas half-open in places. After Morisot's death her daughter Julie Manet, whom Renoir helped to raise, gave the picture to the Petit Palais in Paris in 1908, so it passed almost straight from the family into a public gallery in the city where it was made.