Provenance
(Bernheim-Jeune, Paris); sold 15 June 1910 to (Durand-Ruel, Paris); sold 14 November 1912 to (Carroll Carstairs Gallery, New York).[1] Mrs. Charles Stewart Carstairs [née Elizabeth Stebbins, d. 1949], Lockport, New York, and Paris;[2] bequest 1952 to NGA.
[1] According to memoranda dated 4 December 1986 in NGA curatorial files.
[2] Elizabeth Stebbins was the second wife of Charles S. Carstairs [1865-1928], whose son from his first marriage was Carroll Carstairs [d. 1948]. Mrs. Carstairs' maiden name is provided in a letter of 13 February 1995 from Dr. Lorne Campbell, in NGA curatorial files.
Accession Number
1952.9.2
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 52.1 × 81.3 cm (20 1/2 × 32 in.) | framed: 69.85 × 99.7 × 8.89 cm (27 1/2 × 39 1/4 × 3 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Gift of Mrs. Charles S. Carstairs
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting Canvas French
Background & Context
Background Story
The Sisters, painted in 1869, is one of Morisot earliest Impressionist works and a painting that demonstrates her precocious mastery of the movement defining concerns: light, atmosphere, and the modern treatment of the figure. The painting depicts two women - likely Morisot sisters Edma and Yves - seated together, their faces and costumes rendered in a technique of extraordinary freshness and spontaneity.
The painting belongs to the crucial period of 1868-1870, when the group that would become the Impressionists was forming. Morisot, who had been studying with Corot and who had been painting in the traditional manner, discovered the modern style almost simultaneously with Monet and Renoir, and her early Impressionist works are among the movement most accomplished first statements.
The painting most striking feature is its treatment of the figures, which anticipates the rapid, summary technique of Morisot mature style. The faces are suggested rather than described, the costumes rendered in broad strokes of black and white that create a pattern of light and dark across the canvas. This abbreviation, which was still controversial in 1869, would become Morisot signature and the quality that most distinguished her from her male colleagues, who tended toward a more descriptive manner.
Cultural Impact
Morisot early Impressionist works, of which The Sisters is one of the most accomplished, demonstrated that the movement principles could be applied to the figure as naturally as to the landscape. Her treatment of her sisters faces with the same freedom she brought to the sky or the water established a precedent for the modern portrait that influenced every subsequent painter who sought to render the figure as an optical experience.
Why It Matters
The Sisters captures Morisot at the beginning of her revolution: painting her siblings with a freedom that was both a technical innovation and an assertion of artistic identity. The two women, sitting together, share the same space and the same light - and Morisot rapid brushwork suggests that their bond, like the light that illuminates them, is both visible and invisible, obvious and mysterious.
