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Young Woman Knitting by Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot · 1883-01-01

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Berthe Morisot's 'Young Woman Knitting' (c. 1883) is a quiet refusal. It gives us a figure in a garden, dressed in white, holding her knitting, and then withholds the one thing portraiture usually promises: a face.

The woman's features are deliberately blurred, scraped back into the shadow of her straw hat. Morisot is not interested in who she is. She is interested in what it feels like to be her, in that moment. The absorbed posture, the hands almost dissolved into pink yarn, the warm light breaking across one shoulder, these are the real subject.

Morisot was a central figure in the Impressionist circle and the only woman to exhibit in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. She spent her career painting the domestic world she knew from the inside, not as an outsider looking in. Her brushwork was among the most radical of the group, look closely at the garden foliage and it dissolves into pure abstract gesture, remarkable for the early 1880s.

This painting does not explain the woman, and that is the point. It offers a moment of private interiority so complete that her anonymity becomes the most intimate thing about it.

#arthistory #impressionism #berthemorisot

Details

The entire figure anchors the composition; her anonymized face and absorbed posture embody Morisot's theme of private feminine interiority in domestic life
The entire figure anchors the composition; her anonymized face and absorbed posture embody Morisot's theme of private feminine interiority in domestic life
The entire upper register dissolves into overlapping strokes of green, grey and pink-white blossom; read closely it is pure abstraction , remarkable for 1883
The entire upper register dissolves into overlapping strokes of green, grey and pink-white blossom; read closely it is pure abstraction , remarkable for 1883
A fashionable 1880s accessory rendered with loose strokes; the warm ochre tones against the cool garden create the painting's brightest focal point
A fashionable 1880s accessory rendered with loose strokes; the warm ochre tones against the cool garden create the painting's brightest focal point
Morisot's bravura passage: white painted with lavender, cream and grey , demonstrating her command of broken-color technique to render light on fabric without a single true white stroke
Morisot's bravura passage: white painted with lavender, cream and grey , demonstrating her command of broken-color technique to render light on fabric without a single true white stroke
The geometric lattice of the chair frame introduces the only hard edge in a painting of soft dissolving marks , a structural anchor Morisot uses to stop the figure from floating
The geometric lattice of the chair frame introduces the only hard edge in a painting of soft dissolving marks , a structural anchor Morisot uses to stop the figure from floating
Transcript

She sits alone, absorbed in her work. Her face is almost erased. We never meet her eyes. Berthe Morisot was the only woman in the first Impressionist exhibition. She painted the private lives women lived when no one was watching. A flash of warm light lands on her shoulder and dissolves into the brushwork. This is not a portrait. It is the feeling of a quiet afternoon.