Fillette au Mesnil

Details

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)
Fillette au Mesnil
stamped with signature bottom right 'Berthe Morisot' (Lugt 1826)
oil on canvas
18 5/8 x 16¾ in. (47.3 x 42.6 cm.)
Painted in 1892

Provenance

Paul Valéry, Paris
Roy M. Carver; sale, Sotheby Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, Nov. 5, 1981, lot 173 (illustrated in color)
Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York
Acquired from the above by the late owner on May 13, 1986

Literature

M.-L. Bataille and G. Wildenstein, Berthe Morisot, Catalogue des peintures, pastels et aquarelles, Paris, 1961, p. 43, no. 297 (illustrated, fig. 300)

Exhibited

Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Berthe Morisot (Madame Eugène Manet), 1841-1895, March, 1896, no. 83
Paris, Galerie Marcel Bernheim, Réunion d'oeuvres par Berthe Morisot, June-July, 1922, no. 30
New York, Wildenstein & Co., Inc., One Hundred Years of Impressionism: A Tribute to Durand-Ruel, April-May, 1970, no. 79 (illustrated)

Lot Essay

The subject of the present portrait is a young girl named Jeanne Bodeau from Mézy, a village in the valley of the Seine northwest of Paris. Morisot first traveled to Mézy in April 1890 with her husband Eugène Manet and their daughter Julie; the family spent the next two summers in the area and in fact purchased a house there, a seventeenth century estate known as the chateau at Mesnil. Throughout this period, Morisot used a barn as her studio and the local children of Mézy as her models, focusing upon the same sort of bucolic figure pieces which had absorbed her in Nice during the winter of 1888.