Mademoiselle Louise Riesener in a Hat

About this work

You see a young woman in profile, wearing a big black hat and a dark jacket over a white blouse. Morisot painted her friend Louise Riesener, the daughter of another artist. The hat isn’t just decoration—it tells us Louise was part of Paris’s fashionable middle class, where women wore hats every time they stepped outside. Morisot used quick, soft strokes, almost like sketching, to catch the light on the fabric. If you like this, look up *impasto*—a technique where paint is laid on thickly to create texture.