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In 1874, Berthe Morisot did something her family found scandalous for a woman of her class: she showed her paintings alongside a group of unknown, mostly rejected artists in a photographer's studio on the Boulevard des Capucines, at what became the first Impressionist exhibition. She was the only woman among them that year, and she kept exhibiting with the group through almost all eight of their shows over the next twelve years, once even organising the final one herself while the men argued.

She had been introduced to Édouard Manet in 1868 by a mutual painter friend, and the two became close, Manet painting her portrait more than a dozen times and giving her an easel as a Christmas gift. In 1874, the same year as that first exhibition, she married his younger brother Eugène, which kept her inside the Manet family without the scandal a marriage to Édouard himself, already married, would have caused. Manet in turn is known to have painted over sections of at least one of her canvases himself, a habit she reportedly did not always welcome.

Morisot painted domestic scenes largely off-limits to her male colleagues, women dressing, nursing, reading in gardens, rendered in loose, rapid brushwork that critics at the time sometimes read as unfinished. Her work was not included in a major Paris retrospective until 1896, a year after her death, organised by Renoir, Monet and Degas among others.