Berthe and Edma Morisot began drawing lessons together on their father's initiative and were soon taken to Camille Corot, described as a more benevolent and enlightened teacher than the artist their mother had originally approached^[3]. Corot's method was informal: rather than set exercises, he offered guidance by letter, telling Berthe in May 1864 to work hard and consistently and not to think too much about him, since it was better to consult nature directly^[4]. Both sisters also spent time copying old masters at the Louvre, chaperoned by their mother because of the risk of unsupervised contact with the artists who frequented the museum, and it was there, copying Rubens in 1867, that Berthe was introduced to Édouard Manet^[1]. This shared apprenticeship, lessons, letters, hours in front of the same paintings, gave the sisters a closely related visual education even as their paths afterward diverged.

Berthe Morisot's public career began at the Salon of 1864, where she showed two plein-air landscapes and secured acceptance at the next four consecutive Salons, escaping in 1866 even the harshest jury of that period to show a further pair of landscapes^[3]. Recognition was not uniform: her paintings tended to be hung high on the walls, out of easy view, and in 1865 the critic Paul Mantz dismissed one of her still lifes with the remark that women could succeed at what he called domestic painting since it did not require years spent drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts to paint a copper pot, a candlestick and a bunch of radishes^[3]. Other critics took a different view: by 1868, when she exhibited The Pont-Aven River at Roz-Bras, Émile Zola introduced her to readers of L'Événement illustré as one of the actualistes, artists pursuing truth and originality in contemporary subjects, a considerably more generous framing of the same body of work^[3].

From the outset, Morisot's paintings grew out of direct observation rather than academic formula. She filled sketchbooks with pencil and watercolour studies of trees, blades of grass and birds, and an early oil landscape from 1865, showing thin birch trunks in a green meadow before a small house, already carries the light, almost watercolour-like touch that would mark her mature work, even if the picture itself still lacks the confidence of what followed^[4]. Parks, gardens and other semi-domestic outdoor settings suited this working method well: close enough to home to paint repeatedly and without the social difficulty a woman faced working alone in more public locations, but still outdoor enough to study changing light and the movement of foliage directly, the two concerns Corot's advice had pointed her toward from the start.