In a Park (Dans le parc)

Long grass fills the foreground of Berthe Morisot’s In a Park. A woman in a dark dress sits with a small child against her lap, while another child stands farther back among the trees. Between them, a little black dog lifts its head. Made about 1874, this substantial pastel turns an unhurried family encounter into a study of sunlight, shade and the many different greens of a garden. It belongs to the Petit Palais in Paris, where its French title is Dans le parc.^[1]

The people have names. The museum identifies the woman as Morisot’s sister Edma Pontillon and the children as Edma’s daughters, Jeanne and Blanche. It places the scene at Maurecourt, near Auvers-sur-Oise, where Edma’s parents-in-law had a property.^[2] That family connection gives the picture its intimacy, but its appeal also lies in how much Morisot allows the surrounding vegetation to do. Grass, branches and dark foliage establish the atmosphere in which these small gestures become visible.

A family group spread across the grass

The seated woman gives the composition its strongest vertical. Her dark dress rises from a broad, low shape in the grass to the pale hat above her face. The child leaning across her lap interrupts this upright silhouette with a lighter, softer diagonal. Beside them, the dog forms another dark accent, much smaller but immediately noticeable against the bright meadow. These linked shapes bring the nearest figures together without surrounding them with a hard outline.

The standing child occupies a different pocket of space, toward the left. Her pale face and arms catch the eye against the shadowed bushes behind her. A light, circular hat held in front of her body makes her easy to locate even though the lower part of her dress disappears among the stalks. She is separated from the seated pair by a generous stretch of grass. That interval matters: the family does not form a compact portrait group arranged shoulder to shoulder. Each figure has a position within the garden, and the eye must travel between them.

The younger child’s extended leg draws attention toward the dog, whose raised muzzle comes close to the small foot. The picture leaves the immediate circumstances open. We can see the relationship of child, animal and attentive adult without knowing what has just happened or what will happen next. Morisot makes the encounter legible through proximity and gesture. The standing child’s more distant presence keeps the scene open, suggesting the wider movements of a shared afternoon rather than a single event staged for the viewer.

How the garden holds the scene together

The foreground is unusually full. Long yellow-green strokes rise across the lower edge and pass in front of the figures, so there is no clean, empty platform on which the family sits. The spectator seems to look through the grass. A butterfly net lies across this foreground: its pale handle crosses the darker dress and vegetation, leading down to the blue-green mesh near the lower edge. The equipment gives a more specific character to the garden leisure. Small pale flowers punctuate the field without becoming a separate floral display.

Farther back, the vegetation changes its character. The fine upward marks of the grass give way to branching lines on the left and broader, denser passages of foliage overhead. A light green area behind the seated woman opens the middle distance, while the deep shadow at the upper right checks that opening. These changes in tone create depth without a road, a fence or an architectural perspective carrying us into the picture.

The distribution of dark shapes is especially effective. The woman’s dress, the dog and the trees make a loose series of anchors across the surface. Against them, the faces, hands and hat remain small but distinct. Even the green garden furniture sinks into the vegetation.^[2] Cooler accents are more sparing: blue marks trace the pale hat, and blue-green colour catches the net. They bring small shifts of temperature to the much larger field of warm grass. Morisot can devote much of the sheet to greenery while keeping the people visible through the surrounding patches of colour.

There is also a difference between the movement of the marks and the movement of the people. The woman sits firmly; the standing child pauses. Around them, repeated strokes lean, curl and cross. Looking from the figures to the leaves, the garden begins to seem more restless than its occupants. This is a visual effect built from the direction and density of the pastel marks, and it gives an apparently quiet scene considerable energy.

Pastel with the presence of a painting

At 71 centimetres high and 89 centimetres wide, In a Park has a physical breadth that a small reproduction can disguise. The expanse of grass occupies a major part of the work. Its horizontal format lets the more distant child balance the seated group while leaving space between them. The scale also gives the changing textures of the vegetation room to register.

Pastel is a dry colour medium made from finely ground pigment, filler and a small amount of binder, usually formed into sticks. A slightly textured paper holds the particles. The Metropolitan Museum of Art explains that a stick’s side can create broad, light passages, while its tip and greater pressure can make more concentrated marks. The powder itself reflects light; pastel’s luminosity does not depend on the white paper shining through in the way it can in transparent watercolour.^[12]

Those possibilities help explain why a pastel can combine the drawn line with a dense field of colour. In Morisot’s garden, individual strokes remain readable within larger masses. The grass is both a sunlit area and a collection of directional marks. The branches are lines that belong to a tree, yet they also weave through the surrounding colour. Near the family, pale touches can pick out a hand or the edge of a hat with comparatively little elaboration.

This interplay is central to the work’s character. From a distance, the dark dress and the broad greens establish a coherent scene; closer attention breaks those masses into separate touches. The viewer moves between recognising things and noticing how they have been made. Calling the work a pastel therefore tells us more than which material Morisot selected. It directs attention to the way colour and drawing operate together throughout the sheet.

Outdoor figures in the early Impressionist years

The date places In a Park in a decisive phase of Morisot’s career. She took part in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, having already exhibited at the official Salon from 1864. In its 2019 exhibition, the Musée d’Orsay treated her outdoor figures as experiments in modern life: gardens and seaside settings offered changing light, contemporary clothes and people within the landscape. The museum also emphasised Edma’s importance as a model in the first half of the 1870s.^[3]

This combination of familiar people and pictorial experiment is visible here. The mother’s dark outdoor dress and tilted hat belong to the same scene as the high grass and the children’s play. Clothing is an active part of the design: the dark fabric gives the woman weight, while the hat catches light high above the child’s head. The family provides a human scale against which the surrounding vegetation can seem tall, thick and enveloping.

The private garden also permits a particular kind of closeness. The seated woman and younger child are absorbed in what is happening beside them, while the other child occupies her own space. There is no formal presentation of three faces to the spectator. Morisot builds a picture out of people sharing a place, with their connections expressed through an uneven pattern of attention, distance and touch.

Titles, exhibitions and the journey to the Petit Palais

The various titles describe where the figures are: on the grass, on the lawn, in a park. The 2019 Orsay exhibition list connects Sur l’herbe, Sur la pelouse and Dans un parc.^[3] The inventory number, PPP746, identifies the object securely across these changes in wording.

Marie-Louise Bataille and Georges Wildenstein’s 1961 catalogue lists it as no. 427, Sur la pelouse, under 1874. Its plate 50 shows the same seated woman, two children and dog. The entry records a sale on 24 March 1875 as lot 27, subsequent ownership in the Ephrussi collection, and a gift by Sir Duveen to the Petit Palais. It also records exhibitions in 1892, as no. 38, and 1896, as no. 207.^[13] These details give the intimate scene a substantial public history during Morisot’s lifetime and after her death.

The current Paris Musées record dates Joseph Duveen’s gift precisely to 21 December 1923. Its exhibition history includes L’Art du pastel de Degas à Redon at the Petit Palais in 2017–2018 and the Orsay Morisot exhibition in 2019.^[1] These two contexts offer complementary ways to look at the work: within the possibilities of pastel as a medium, and within Morisot’s sustained exploration of figures in outdoor space.

Two revealing garden comparisons

Morisot’s The Butterfly Hunt provides a close comparison. This separate oil painting, dated 1874 and held by the Musée d’Orsay, also depicts Edma, Jeanne and Blanche at Maurecourt.^[14] Its upright woman in a white dress occupies the centre-right, holding a long-handled net, while the children stand to the left. In the pastel, the dark-clothed woman is seated, and the younger child and dog bring the main action close to the ground. The shared setting and family make the different arrangements particularly instructive: Morisot found more than one composition in the activities of the same people.

An earlier view of Edma offers another useful connection. The Artist’s Sister Edma Seated on a Bench is a small, vertical watercolour over graphite, dated 1864, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.^[15] Its seated figure fills much of the narrow sheet; the bench, flowers and parasol gather around her. In In a Park, the wider format distributes attention across several figures and a much greater area of vegetation. Seen together, the works show how a familiar sitter could participate in very different relationships between a person and a garden.