Girl in a Boat with Geese

Girl in a Boat with Geese, painted around 1889, depicts a child in a small boat surrounded by geese on a river. The painting exemplifies Morisot late style, in which her brushwork achieved its greatest freedom and her color its greatest luminosity. The water, the geese, the boat, and the child are rendered in a rapid, broken technique that dissolves form into light. Morisot painted this work during a summer stay at Mezy, northwest of Paris, where she spent the last years of her life. The garden, the river, and the surrounding countryside provided subjects for some of her most luminous late works, painted in a technique that had achieved the fluency of watercolor in the medium of oil. The painting most striking feature is its treatment of water. Morisot renders the river in horizontal strokes of blue, green, and white that suggest the surface without describing it, creating a field of reflected color in which the boat and its occupant float as though suspended. The geese, rendered as quick curved strokes of white, are both birds and brushstrokes - living creatures that exist at the boundary between representation and abstraction, where Morisot late painting most characteristically dwells.

Morisot late paintings influenced the development of Intimism and the watercolor revival in French painting. Her demonstration that the most rapid, summary technique could produce works of the highest artistic ambition influenced Bonnard and the tradition of painterly painting in the 20th century.

This painting captures Morisot at her most free and most beautiful: a child in a boat, geese on a river, and a world dissolved in light. The painting speed - the sense that it was made as quickly as the moment it depicts - is its most profound quality: the record of a perception so rapid and so complete that only a lifetime of looking could have produced it.