Berthe Morisot with a Muff

Berthe Morisot, the future Impressionist painter, was Manet’s most frequent model in the years around 1870, and this portrait shows her in the fur-trimmed black dress she wore on many occasions, muff raised toward her face. It belongs to a celebrated series in which Manet, testing the boundary between likeness and paint, rendered her features repeatedly with an increasingly free, sketch-like touch. The picture is at once a record of a close professional friendship and a demonstration of the bravura handling that made Manet the pivotal figure between Realism and Impressionism.