Berthe and Edma Morisot trained as painters together and were, for a period, equally serious about the prospect of a career. Berthe's early portrait of Edma, shown at the Salon of 1872, was painted while Edma was visiting their parents to give birth to her daughter, folding the two sisters' domestic and artistic lives into a single occasion^[4]. Edma's own painting stopped after her marriage, a choice common enough for women of her class and period, while Berthe continued, becoming one of the founding members of the Impressionist group and exhibiting in most of its independent shows^[1]. That divergence did not end the sisters' closeness: Edma remained Morisot's confidante and, repeatedly, her model, appearing across Morisot's work at different stages of her own life, as a young woman, then as a mother, drawn with the same attentiveness a subject usually reserved for a professional sitter.

Morisot's contemporaries among the male Impressionists, Degas and Renoir among them, could paint bars, backstage dressing rooms, the crowd on a boulevard, any public space a man of their class could enter without comment. That range was largely closed to Morisot and to other women in the group, including Mary Cassatt, whose own subjects cluster instead around dining rooms, drawing rooms, bedrooms, balconies and private gardens^[2]. A bourgeois woman going out alone in Paris risked her reputation in ways a man never did, and Morisot's work registers that restriction directly, not as a limitation she complained of in her paintings but as the actual shape of the life she had access to paint^[3]. Read this way, the recurrence of Edma, of nieces and nephews, of her own later daughter Julie, is not simply a matter of convenience or affection. It reflects which rooms and which relationships were available to her as a subject in the first place.

Morisot married Eugène Manet, brother of the painter Edouard Manet, in December 1874, a match declared that summer while the two families holidayed together in Normandy^[4]. Unlike Edma, marriage did not end Morisot's painting career. Eugène became her frequent model and supporter rather than a replacement occupation, and Morisot went on to exhibit in seven of the Impressionist group's eight independent exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, missing only one show, after the birth of her daughter Julie in 1878^[3][5]. Contemporaries at the time singled out her quick, feathery, occasionally rough brushwork and her subject matter, ranging from close family life to fashionable bourgeois society, as distinctive within the group, and by the 1890s a critic had grouped her with Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond as the movement's three leading women painters^[5].