Woman and Child in a Garden 1884

Berthe Morisot made this oil painting on canvas, titled *Woman and Child in a Garden*, sometime in the late 19th century. Morisot used loose brushstrokes and a light palette to capture a fleeting moment of domestic life in her painting, and this very act can be tied to wider social issues of labor, politics, and consumption. The strokes aren't blended or polished, and in the woman's dress, for instance, we see individual dots of paint. The lack of precise detail lends an unfinished quality to the work, as if Morisot captured the scene in a few short sittings. But this apparent spontaneity was in fact hard won. Morisot, like many Impressionists, was reacting against the academic painting style of the French establishment, which valued meticulous realism and historical or mythological subjects. Instead, Morisot chose to paint modern life, in a style that emphasized the act of painting itself, and by doing so, she challenged the traditional hierarchy between fine art and craft.