Postcard Berthe Morisot - Young Woman in Ball Gown (detail), 1879

A major figure in Impressionism, Berthe Morisot remains less well known today than his friends Monet, Degas and Renoir. Yet she was immediately recognized as one of the group's most innovative artists. Painting after a model allows Berthe Morisot to explore several themes of modern life, such as the intimacy of bourgeois life, the taste for resorts and gardens, the importance of fashion, women's domestic work, while blurring the boundaries between interior/exterior, private/public, finished/unfinished. For her, painting must strive to "fix something of what is going on". Modern subjects and speed of execution therefore have to do with the temporality of representation, and the artist is tirelessly confronted with the ephemeral and the passage of time. Thus his latest works, characterized by a new expressiveness and musicality, invite us to a melancholic mediation on these relationships between art and life.