Pasie cousant dans le jardin de Bougival

This 1881 canvas shows Pasie — the Manet family's nanny — sewing in the garden of their Bougival house. Like Mary Cassatt's domestic scenes, Morisot's paintings of household workers in bourgeois outdoor settings document the social structure of upper-middle-class Parisian life with unusual directness. Pasie appears in several of Morisot's Bougival paintings as a trusted member of the household rather than as a generic genre type. The garden setting provides Morisot with her characteristically luminous, leaf-filtered light, and the absorbed figure of the sewing woman gives the composition its quiet human centre.

Morisot's handling is exceptionally free — rapid, calligraphic strokes that suggest the garden's foliage, Pasie's dress, and the light falling across the scene. The figure of Pasie sewing is integrated into the surrounding vegetation rather than isolated from it. The loose technique is characteristic of her mature style and influenced later artists including her friend Renoir.