La Chasse aux papillons

The woman standing in the long grass with a net is Edma, the painter's older sister. The two of them had trained under the same teachers and shown at the Salon together, until Edma married a naval officer in 1869 and stopped painting altogether. She wrote to Berthe afterwards that she often slipped away in her thoughts into her sister's studio, if only for a quarter of an hour, to breathe the air they had shared for years.

Morisot painted this in 1874 in the garden at Maurecourt, north-west of Paris, where her sister's husband's family had a house and where she spent long stretches of those summers. The two small figures half hidden in the foliage on the left are Edma's daughters, Jeanne and Blanche. The canvas is not large, 46 by 56 centimetres.

Edma kept sitting for her sister through the rest of the 1870s, in gardens and at windows, one of the constants of Morisot's painting in those years.