NARRATOR—Berthe Morisot was one of the principle female proponents of Impressionism. This painting, from around 1870, is one of her few surviving early works. Dissatisfied and frustrated by her initial efforts, Morisot destroyed most of her existing works around the time of her thirtieth birthday.

Here, she depicts a woman of the elegant upper-middle class, to which the artist herself belonged. The sitter is thought to be Marguerite Carré, one of the artist's friends who lived with her parents in the fashionable Paris suburb of Passy, not far from the Morisot family home. Here we see her dressed in a frilly pink dress, seated comfortably, if a bit stiffly, on a sofa in the parent's drawing room.It apparently took Morisot several months and a number of sittings to complete the work; signs of this struggle are evident in the occasional passages of awkward, halting brushwork and in the considerable adjustments she made to the composition as the work progressed.