公園にて

Morisot made this pastel around 1874, the spring the Impressionists first showed together on their own terms. In April of that year a group including Monet, Degas, Renoir and Pissarro hung their work in the studio of the photographer Nadar, outside the official Salon, and the reviews were mostly scornful. Morisot was there among them, the only woman in the founding group, showing ten pieces. This is the kind of scene she preferred to the grand subjects the men were painting: a young woman in black seated in deep grass in a park, holding a reclining child, with a second little girl and a small dog nearby. She worked it quickly in pastel, the strokes left loose and open.