Albine Sermicoli in the Studio

Morisot ran an informal studio and regularly invited models and fellow artists' wives and daughters to sit for her. Albine Sermicoli appears to have been one such studio sitter in the 1880s, and this interior setting allowed Morisot to play with the complex relationships between the depicted figure, her physical environment, and the act of painting itself. Studio paintings occupied a distinct place in her output alongside domestic interiors and garden scenes — they permitted a kind of self-reflection on her own practice without the self-portraiture more common among her male contemporaries.

The studio setting creates a dialogue between the sitter and the surrounding pictorial elements — canvases, draperies, and furnishings rendered in Morisot's characteristically fluid notation. Cool light from an unseen window defines the figure's left side while the right recedes into warm shadow, creating subtle three-dimensionality.