La Psyché

A psyche is a tall mirror on a tilting frame, and in the 1870s it stood in the dressing room of every fashionable Parisian woman. Morisot painted a young woman before hers in 1876, the spring of the second Impressionist exhibition, where she was the only woman among the group. She kept the moment plainly ordinary. A girl in her underclothes pauses to check herself as the day begins, and the paint stays loose and unfinished at the edges, exactly the looseness critics kept holding against the Impressionists. Morisot returned to these private interiors again and again, the hours of a woman's day that the male painters of her circle rarely entered.