Le Port de Lorient

In the summer of 1869 Berthe Morisot spent two months at the naval port of Lorient, on the Brittany coast, visiting her sister Edma. The two had trained as painters side by side, but Edma had just married a naval officer stationed here and, as married women of their class were expected to, had set down her brushes for good. Berthe kept hers. She placed Edma at the far right, small and cool in white, perched on the sunlit parapet, and gave most of the canvas to the water and the moored fishing boats under a wide pale sky. Back in Paris she gave the painting to her friend Édouard Manet, who admired it enough to keep it.