Ragazza con gabbia

Berthe Morisot painted this in 1885, when she was the one woman at the heart of the Impressionist group and had spent a decade painting the world within reach of a respectable Parisian woman, the gardens, the drawing rooms, her own daughter. Here a girl in a red jacket stands in that enclosed domestic green with a birdcage beside her. Morisot handles it all with the loose, sketchy touch of her mature years, the paint left open and quick so the whole thing feels caught rather than posed. She kept her palette narrow, browns and whites and greens, and let the brushwork carry the life. The picture went to the Danish collector Wilhelm Hansen and hangs today at his house, Ordrupgaard, outside Copenhagen.