1870. In the Villa Fodor, Berthe Morisot sets up her easel facing Marguerite Carré dressed in an elegant pink gown. The artist hesitates, reworks, erases. Jacques-Émile Blanche, painter and privileged witness, recounts this obstinate quest for rightness.
A Composition Bathed in Light
Morisot captures Marguerite seated on a sofa. The pink dress dominates the composition with its brilliant luminosity and rapid touches that create an effect of shimmering fabric. The brushstrokes remain visible, assertive. Morisot does not smooth, she constructs through fragments of color. This technique eliminates heavy shadows in favor of subtle nuances. The result: a vibrant work that seems to capture the very instant.
A Modernity in Gestation
This portrait belongs to the years preceding the official birth of Impressionism. Morisot already explores the painting that Renoir or Monet would champion. She breaks with dark academicism to privilege natural light and spontaneity of gesture. Jacques-Émile Blanche testifies to her perfectionism: she endlessly repainted between sittings. This rigor explains why so few early works survived. The Pink Dress thus becomes a rare document on the evolution of a major 19th-century artist.
Berthe Morisot, Pioneer of Impressionism
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was one of the rare women admitted to the Impressionist circle. A student of Corot, she exhibited at the official Salon from 1864 before joining the Impressionists in 1874. Her style privileges feminine intimacy and bourgeois life, treated with audacious pictorial freedom.
Think about it
💭 And you, what does this young woman frozen in her luminous dress inspire in you?
About This Work
- The Pink Dress (Albertie-Marguerite Carré, later Madame Ferdinand-Henri Himmes)
- Berthe Morisot
- circa 1870
- Oil on canvas
- 80.6 × 99.7 cm
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438009
