À la campagne

Morisot painted this in 1881 and showed it the next year at the seventh of the Impressionist exhibitions, the shows the group put on themselves because the official Salon had little time for them. She was one of the few women at the centre of that circle, and one of its steadiest exhibitors. The scene is the ease of a summer in the countryside, a woman at rest after the midday meal, which is why the picture also carries the name After Lunch. Morisot worked these outdoor family hours again and again in the early 1880s, painting the people closest to her. The brushwork stays loose and quick, unfinished-looking in the way that still annoyed the critics of the day.