The Artist's Daughter with a Parakeet

The Artist Daughter with a Parakeet, painted in 1890, depicts Morisot daughter Julie with a pet parakeet perched on her hand. The painting belongs to Morisot late period, when her brushwork had achieved its greatest freedom and her color its greatest vibrancy. Julie Manet, Morisot only child, was the subject of some of her most tender and most formally ambitious paintings. Born in 1878, Julie grew up at the center of the Impressionist world: her godfather was Edouard Manet, her mother was Berthe Morisot, and her childhood was documented in paintings by Renoir and photographs by Nadar. Morisot paintings of Julie record both a mother love and a painter formal investigation. The painting most striking feature is its color. The cool blues and greens of the interior provide a setting for the vivid green of the parakeet and the warm flesh tones of Julie face and hands. Morisot late palette, influenced by the Neo-Impressionists, achieves a chromatic richness that rivals the most ambitious color painting of the 1890s. The rapid, feathery brushwork that was Morisot signature here reaches its极限 - each stroke a notation of perception so rapid that the painting seems to have been made in the time it takes to glance at a child.

Morisot paintings of Julie Manet are the most intimate documents of motherhood in Impressionist art and influenced the tradition of mother-and-child painting that extends through Cassatt to the present. Her combination of maternal tenderness and formal ambition demonstrated that domestic subject matter could sustain the most serious artistic investigation.

This painting captures Morisot at her most spontaneous and most skillful: a mother painting her child with a pet, in a technique so rapid that it seems to have been done in a single breath. The parakeet, green and restless on Julie hand, is the perfect Morisot subject: a living thing, briefly still, about to fly.