Le jardin à Bougival

Le jardin à Bougival, painted in 1884 at Bougival where Morisot's family rented a summer house, is among the most spontaneous and fully realized garden scenes of her Impressionist period. 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 barely contained brushwork, the dissolution of form in summer light, and the intimacy of the garden scene define her mature style at its most characteristic — a vision of domestic life that is simultaneously precise social observation and formally adventurous painting.

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 is high-keyed and delicate, favoring pale blues, whites, and soft greens, with figures dissolving into their garden surroundings in a formal integration of person and environment that goes further than most of her male colleagues were willing to go.