She counted Degas and Renoir and Monet and Pissaro among her friends. From that time until her death she was part of the Impressionist inner circle. She learned to paint through a private tutor and her work was exhibited at the official yearly Salons in Paris for a number of years until she fell in with the above-mentioned Impressionists in the mid 1870s. She was of a well-to-do family and lived a comfortable life. Morisot was born in 1841 and died in 1895.

Woman in Grey Reclining was painted, I should mention, by a French woman named Berthe Morisot. Something grinds to a halt in this area of grey-white smear. This is in jarring contrast to the flow of the marks on the dress and the wall behind the couch, which move in the opposite direction. They go more or less up and down, and angle a little bit toward the upper left side of the painting. It’s quite disconcerting when you really focus on it. Do you see it? What is that smear doing there? It’s not part of the couch. It’s an area of paint in the middle right side of the painting (from the viewer’s perspective), the smudgy area of white and grey over the top of the couch just beyond the woman’s arm. I’m interested in a very specific part of this painting. But it stuck and became a moniker of pride, as often happens with insults. The term was originally meant as an insult.

We’ve come to call this kind of painting impressionist. A stroke of black across the neck, giving us the sense of a choker. That’s because much of the detail in the painting is only hinted at by the brushwork. Does she have a white flower on the left strap of her dress? Maybe. It depicts a woman in a lovely dress reclining on a couch. The painting is known as Woman in Grey Reclining.

Berthe Morisot by Malika Bauwens