View of Paris from the Trocadero
Berthe Morisot·1872
Historical Context
Painted in 1872 and now in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, this canvas offers a panoramic view of Paris from the Trocadéro heights, then undeveloped gardens that would later become the site of the Trocadéro palace built for the 1878 Exposition Universelle. Morisot and her family lived in this affluent western district of Paris, and the elevated view over the city and the Seine below was available to her from her own neighborhood. This large urban landscape is one of her most ambitious purely outdoor subjects.
Technical Analysis
The panoramic view is structured with a broad foreground of open ground, figures in fashionable dress providing human scale, and the city and sky extending beyond. Morisot uses a fresh, airy palette of pale blues, greens, and warm ochres, the distant city treated as tonal suggestion rather than architectural description.
