The Pink Dress by Berthe Morisot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 2009

Artist: Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895)

Title: The Pink Dress (Albertie-Marguerite Carré, later Madame Ferdinand-Henri Himmes, 1854–1935)

Date: ca. 1870

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 21 1/2 x 26 1/2 in. (54.6 x 67.3 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002

Accession Number: 2003.20.8

On View

Gallery Label:

The fashionable portraitist Jacques-Emile Blanche, a friend of Berthe Morisot, recollected how and when this painting was made at the Villa Fodor, the family home of Marguerite Carré, the sitter: "One day, she [Morisot] painted before my eyes a charming portrait of Mlle Marguerite in a light pink dress; indeed, the entire canvas was light. Here Berthe Morisot was fully herself, already eliminating from nature both shadows and half-tones." But the painting required several sessions, since Morisot "constantly changed her mind and painted over what she had done once the session was at an end . . . ." "The Pink Dress" is one of the artist's few surviving early works.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/europe...