Berthe Morisot con un ventaglio

Between 1868 and 1874 Manet painted Berthe Morisot, a gifted painter in her own right, about a dozen times. This is the last of them. In the earlier portraits she looks straight at him. Here she looks away, a fan half hiding her face. The black dress is mourning for her father, who had recently died, but on the hand holding the fan there is a wedding ring: that same year she had married Manet's younger brother Eugene, which made her his sister-in-law. Behind her the flat patterned wall nods to the Japanese prints then fashionable in Paris. After this portrait she never posed for him again.