Interpretive Resource

The image of a young woman in a garden has an enduring and fascinating history in European art. Although the Garden of Eden in the Judeo-Christian tradition provided the setting for Eve to lead Adam into temptation, by the late Middle Ages, the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) became a symbol of female chastity; by the eighteenth century, a woman alone in a flowering bower conveyed a provocative promise: she was waiting for a tryst with her lover. But when Berthe Morisot painted her models in the private garden of her own house on the rue de Fillejust in Paris, she transcended conventional associations to express a distinctly contemporary sensibility.

The Garden’s central figure is a professional model named Milly, who often worked for Morisot. But the artist made the woman’s identity inconsequential to the painting by handling her features summarily, brushing them in with a few telling strokes. Rather than working toward realistic portraiture or articulated narrative, Morisot focused her attention on the play of light as it illuminated the foliage and two figures in the garden. Bright sunlight reflects off their straw hats and pale complexions. The ground to the left of the central figure gleams under direct rays, while more light flickers through the diamond pattern of the leaf-covered fence at the back of the space. For a woman of Morisot’s generation and social class, the private city garden was a sheltered environment where she could enjoy the pleasures of the outdoors in undisturbed contentment.