Autorretrato

Morisot painted very few pictures of herself, and this one is dated 1885, months before she and her husband Eugène Manet took on the job of organising what turned out to be the last Impressionist exhibition. The group was coming apart over it. Degas insisted on bringing in the young Seurat and Signac, Monet and Renoir stayed away, and when the show opened in Paris in May 1886 Seurat had the Grande Jatte in a room of its own. Morisot hung her work there as she had at every one of the eight shows but one. She looks out of this canvas with her dress and her hands left as a few bare strokes. She sold little in her lifetime, which is why so much of her painting stayed with her family, and it was her descendants who left it to the Marmottan.