Interpretive Resource

In 1876 Albert Wolff, writing in the popular Paris newspaper Le Figaro, described the artists who organized the first Impressionist exhibition as "five or six lunatics of which one is a woman." That woman was Berthe Morisot. Trained by Camille Corot and mentored by Edouard Manet, Morisot had shown at the annual Salon as early as 1864. Ten years later, she rejected the conventional route to recognition and became a founding member of the Impressionist movement, remaining a staunch supporter through its final group exhibition, held in 1886.

Like her male colleagues, Morisot selected her subjects from the life that surrounded her. But as a bourgeois woman, her experiences were circumscribed by society’s definitions of what was suitably feminine. The public sphere depicted by the male Impressionist painters—the café, the racetrack, the city street—was not Morisot’s domain. Rather, as seen in On the Balcony, she drew her subjects from her own environment. While sheltered, she was by no means cut off from the world.

Here, Morisot infused the traditional mother-and-child theme with a refined, distinctively contemporary sensibility. The brush strokes that articulate the details of the woman’s fashionable dress are as delicate and diaphanous as the material of the garment. A child stands near the adult, secure but not restricted. Together, they lean against the wrought-iron railing, sharing a view across the river of the Paris skyline, golden against a hazy sky. In devising her composition, Morisot may have recalled Manet’s On the Balcony(1868–69; Paris, Musée d’Orsay), for which she had posed. However, whereas Manet’s sitters face forward, Morisot preferred to turn her figures away from the viewer, preserving their modest anonymity.