Eugène Manet et sa fille dans le jardin de Bougival

This 1881 Musee d'Orsay canvas shows Berthe Morisot's husband Eugene Manet — the painter's brother — with their daughter Julie Manet in the garden of their rented house at Bougival, a Seine valley village popular with Parisian summer visitors. Morisot was one of Impressionism's most important figures and the only woman to exhibit consistently with the group. Scenes of bourgeois domestic garden life — husband, child, summer light — were central to her practice and gave her both intimate access to subjects she knew deeply and a subject domain she could work without the social restrictions that limited women painters in public spaces.

Morisot uses her characteristic loose, rapid brushwork that creates an effect of spontaneity and surface vitality. The garden setting is rendered in flickering touches of warm and cool greens. The figures are loosely but expressively painted — Eugene's dark suit contrasting with Julie's lighter dress. The overall effect is of captured summer light and family ease.