Eugène Manet and His Daughter at Bougival (Eugène Manet et sa fille dans le jardin de Bougival) is an 1881 painting in the Impressionist style by the leading female French artist Berthe Morisot. This work is located in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, France.
Analysis of Eugène Manet and His Daughter at Bougival
Eugène Manet and His Daughter at Bougival (1881) is a family picture by Berthe Morisot showing, in a personal Impressionist style, her husband and her daughter.
The location, as the title confirms, is Bougival, the attractive suburb of Paris, where, in the midst of trees and by the Seine, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, as well as Morisot and her husband, came to paint and made it a cardinal geographic reference in the history of Impressionism and indeed French painting more broadly.
Father and daughter are sitting on a bench in a park-like surround. The iron railing in the distance makes us suppose we are hard by the Seine. The flowery concentrations behind them tell us we are in the season of bloom, but we also note the two figures’ substantial clothing and the father’s pocketed hands.
Eugène Manet, her husband, and brother of the more famous Édouard Manet, was himself an amateur painter and public official. Within Impressionism, he is best known for appearing in his brother’s and his wife’s pictures. In this instance, he is looking at some kind of tablet over his knees on top of which his infant daughter, Julie, has placed a collection of toys see is presently handling.
This painting is an ingratiating exhibition of Berthe Morisot’s familial and prosaic interests. It is a case of Impressionism whose pursuit of vegetation is aimed at a decorative effect. Her eye is for the people dearest to her, and everything else, like the edges of this family snapshot, is evanescent.