The Cradle

In the front right of Berthe Morisot's Cradle, a mother is quietly drawing a gauze veil across her sleeping baby. The mother is Morisot's older sister Edma; the baby is her daughter Blanche. Edma had been a serious painter herself before she married a naval officer in 1869. She never picked up a brush again. In the painting she is drawing the veil closed between us and the child, asserting a domestic privacy that had swallowed her own life. Morisot showed this at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, the first woman ever to exhibit with the group. No one would buy it. Now at Musée d'Orsay, Paris @museeorsay