The Cradle

The Cradle is Berthe Morisot’s celebrated portrait of her sister Edma watching over her infant daughter Blanche as she sleeps beneath a sheer muslin curtain. With its luminous whites, loose brushwork, and tender concentration, the painting is considered a key work of early Impressionism — and when the Louvre purchased it in 1930, it became one of the first works by a woman Impressionist to enter the French national collection; it now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay.