Ragazza in un parco

Berthe Morisot began this canvas in 1888, set it aside, and only came back to finish it in 1893, two years before she died. The girl, called Jeanne-Marie, sits slightly off to one side with a half-formed smile, and Morisot lets the loose green foliage take up as much of the picture as the child, so it hovers between a portrait and a landscape. By this point Morisot had been showing with the Impressionists for nearly 20 years, the only woman in their very first exhibition of 1874, painting the world she was allowed into as a respectable wife and mother: gardens, drawing rooms, children. Her daughter Julie later gave the painting to a museum in Toulouse, where it still hangs in a room of red walls.