Ritratto di Julie Manet

By 1894 Julie Manet had already lost her father, Eugène Manet, brother of the painter Édouard Manet, who had died two years before. Her mother, the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, was ailing. Renoir, an old friend of the household, painted her here at about 15. Within a year Morisot was dead too, and Julie became an orphan at 16, placed under the guardianship of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. She grew up among the painters who had known her since birth, and kept a diary of them, from Renoir and Degas to Monet at the dinner table, that survives as one of the closest records we have of that circle.