El reposo

The woman sinking into the red sofa is Berthe Morisot, herself one of the sharpest painters of the Impressionist circle, who sat for Manet again and again and later married his brother. He painted her around 1871, just as Paris was picking itself up after the Prussian siege and the bloody weeks of the Commune. She is dressed informally, one arm flung along the cushions, her gaze drifting somewhere past us, a looseness that offended some viewers who felt a lady should not be shown so unguarded. Above her hangs a Japanese woodblock print, the kind then flooding Paris and reshaping how its artists thought about flat colour and empty space. Manet himself called the picture a study in repose and said it was never meant as a portrait at all.