La Mère et la sœur de l’artiste

Morisot painted her mother and her sister Edma in the winter of 1869, while Edma was staying with the family to await her first child, the pregnancy tucked away under a loose white robe. Nervous about sending the picture to the Salon, Morisot asked Edouard Manet, a friend and mentor, to look it over on the last day for entries. Instead of giving advice he picked up a brush and started reworking the mother's figure, and once he began he would not stop, moving from skirt to bodice to face. Morisot wrote to Edma in near despair about it. You can still see two hands in the canvas, Manet's quick confident black in the seated mother and Morisot's finer, more searching touch in her sister. It hangs in Washington.