Young girl with a doll

Morisot's paintings of children with toys and dolls sit within a broader Impressionist engagement with childhood as a subject of modern life — Renoir, Cassatt, and Morisot all returned to it repeatedly, finding in children's unselfconsciousness a freedom of observation denied in more formal portraiture. Morisot's particular contribution was to root these images in her own domestic sphere, giving them an intimacy that distinguishes them from commissioned childhood portraits. The doll itself functions as a kind of double — a small feminine figure that the girl tends as the artist herself tends the canvas.

Morisot renders the doll's rigid form against the child's softer figure using tighter, more defined strokes than her usual notation — a deliberate contrast that subtly emphasizes the difference between animate and inanimate. The background dissolves into unresolved color, concentrating attention on the central pair.