Berthe Morisot's Paintings Like The Cradle

Morisot painted what she experienced on a daily basis. Her paintings reflect the 19th-century cultural restrictions of her class and gender. She avoided urban and street scenes as well as the nude figure and, like her fellow female Impressionist Mary Cassatt, focused on domestic life and portraits in which she could use family and personal friends as models. Paintings like The Cradle, in which she depicted current trends for nursery furniture, reflect her sensitivity to fashion and advertising, both of which would have been apparent to her female audience. Her works also include landscapes, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes.

In Reading, an 1873 painting by Berthe Morisot, Morisot tackles a subject previously explored by Claude Monet and Pierre-Augusta Renoir: a contemporary woman in a park, enjoying a leisure activity. Featured here is Morisot's sister Edma. Edma wears a light, gauzy summer gown of the latest cut. A straw hat with a trailing scarf perched on the top of her head, an open fan, and a parasol complete her ensemble. Critics praised Berthe Morisot's Reading as graceful, confident, and even witty.

Morisot's art depicts the world of the bourgeois, their clothes, their lifestyle, their surroundings, and her relationships. Through her unusual
76: women out in public being vulnerable to a compromising gaze. The witty pun on the spectator outside the painting being matched by that within should not disguise the serious meaning of the fact that social spaces are policed by men's watching women and the positioning of the spectator outside the painting in relation to the man within it serves to indicate that the spectator participates in that game as well. The fact that the woman is pictured so actively looking, signified above all by the fact that her eyes are masked by opera glasses, prevents her being objectified and she figures as the subject of her own