A young mother rests her chin on her hand and quietly watches her sleeping baby; a gauze veil falls from the cradle's hood, wrapping the child in soft white light. The sitters are Morisot's sister Edma and her newborn daughter. This tender, restrained little picture was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.
Key facts
- Artist
- Berthe Morisot1841–1895 · French
- Date
- 1872
- Period
- Impressionism1860–1890
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 56 × 46 cm
- Location
- Musée d'Orsay Paris, France
Actual size
Compared with an adult 170 cm tall
Palette
#ADA190#C4B7A2#332B24#7B7063#DFD4C1Background
Morisot and her sister Edma had studied painting together since girlhood; both were gifted, and both had pictures accepted at the Salon. In 1869 Edma married the naval officer Adolphe Pontillon, moved away with him and gave up painting, while Berthe went on to make painting her life's work.
In 1872, soon after the birth of Edma's second daughter, Blanche, Morisot painted her sister watching over the baby; the picture holds a mother's tenderness, and perhaps a hint of wistfulness for the art her sister had given up for family.
In 1874 it hung in the photographer Nadar's former studio at the first Impressionist exhibition, where Morisot was the only woman exhibitor. It did not sell and stayed in the family until the Louvre bought it in 1930; it is now in the Musée d'Orsay.
Technique & composition
The palette is mostly white, grey and pink. is painted in quick, transparent strokes that seem to let light through. The only darks are and , which make the whites glow.
Diagonals bind the composition: the mother's gaze slants down to the child, rests on the cradle's edge, and the drawn-back curtain falls diagonally from the upper left. echoes the baby's arm raised beside its head, linking mother and child.
Details
Symbolism
Watching over
sleeps behind the veil while the mother gazes from outside it. The gauze both shelters the child and gently separates the two, giving their intimacy a quiet distance.
A woman's view
Nineteenth-century women painters could not easily frequent cafés and theatres, so Morisot drew on domestic life. Her mother is no idealised Madonna but a real woman with thoughts of her own.
Stories
- Did you know?
Morisot was Manet's friend and one of his favourite models. In the same year, 1872, he painted Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets; two years later she married his brother Eugène.
- Did you know?
Critics of her day tended to praise her work for its “feminine grace”; scholars today stress instead her bold, free brushwork and count her among the most technically daring of the Impressionists.
Legacy
The Cradle is one of the earliest Impressionist images of mother and child and Morisot's most famous picture. It paved the way for women painters such as Cassatt to take women's lives as their subject, and is a reminder that Impressionism was never an all-male affair.
