Girl on a Divan

Girl on a Divan belongs to Morisot's domestic interior figure paintings of the 1880s, depicting a young woman or girl reclining on a sofa in the comfortable Impressionist interior that she populated with female figures throughout her career. The divan or daybed was a fashionable piece of furniture in bourgeois French apartments of the period — associated with leisure, reading, and the particular domestic freedom available to women in their own homes. Morisot's reclining figures are never passive objects of male viewing but figures absorbed in their own interior life.

The divan's fabric provides the dominant background note against which the figure is seen. Morisot's characteristic touch renders fabrics and the girl's dress in rapid, varied strokes that describe textile without laborious precision.