Portrait of Mme Boursier and Her Daughter

Portrait of Mme Boursier and Her Daughter, painted in 1873, is one of Morisot's earliest major double portraits, combining the bourgeois portrait commission with her Impressionist approach to light and atmosphere. Morisot was the most prominent woman among the Impressionists, exhibiting in seven of the eight group shows and bringing to portraiture the same spontaneous observation of light and form that she applied to her garden and domestic scenes. The mother-and-daughter portrait was a conventional subject in nineteenth-century French portraiture, but Morisot transforms the conventional format through her emphasis on atmosphere and her refusal of academic finish. The Brooklyn Museum holds this canvas as part of its collection of French Impressionist 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 creams that render the women's figures with a freshness that dissolves the conventional solidity of the portrait format into something closer to a glimpsed moment of domestic life.