Femme au jardin (villa Arnulphi à Nice)

Femme au jardin at the Villa Arnulphi in Nice, painted in 1882 during one of Morisot's winter stays on the Riviera, brings her Impressionist approach to the Mediterranean light and garden setting of the south of France. Morisot was the most prominent woman among the Impressionists, exhibiting in seven of the eight group shows, and her domestic and garden subjects reflect both the social constraints that confined bourgeois women to private rather than public spaces and her extraordinary ability to transform those constraints into formal freedom. The warm Mediterranean light of Nice gave her palette a different quality from the northern gardens of Paris and Bougival, and the comparison of this southern work with her Parisian canvases reveals how sensitively she adapted her approach to changing conditions of light.

Morisot's brushwork is among the most daring in Impressionism — rapid, scumbled strokes that seem barely to adhere to the canvas, creating a sense of ambient light and spontaneous observation. Her palette in this Nice garden is warmer and more saturated than her northern canvases — pale yellows, warm greens, soft ochres — capturing the Mediterranean light with the same spontaneous freshness she brought to all her outdoor subjects.