Woman at Her Toilette

Berthe Morisot, the chronicler of the leisured interiors of her own class, turned the private ritual of the toilette into an image of shimmering tenderness in the later 1870s. The sitter’s back is toward us as she adjusts her hair before a mirror, but no salon anecdote interrupts the effect: the whole picture is given over to the play of white linen, pale wall and the quick, feathery brushwork that dissolves form into light. Where her male colleagues painted the boudoir as theater, Morisot painted it as the loose, ordinary texture of a woman’s morning, and the result is at once the most intimate and the least posed of the Impressionist figure pictures. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.