Pastorella nuda distesa

Berthe Morisot spent her career painting the world she was allowed into as a respectable bourgeois woman: drawing rooms, gardens, her daughter, women at their toilette. The full nude was largely off limits to her, both by propriety and by the plain difficulty of a woman hiring and studying a naked model. This painting, from 1891, is her boldest attempt at it, made only a few years before her death. A girl from the village posed for the shepherdess, lying on the grass by the water with her head propped on one hand. Morisot admired the nudes of Renoir and Degas, yet she did not borrow their poses. Her handling stays loose and quick, the paint brushed on in open strokes, so the body seems to breathe in the light rather than hold still to be looked at.