Click here to listen to an audio description of 'Berthe Morisot drawing, with her daughter', in which co-curator Katherine George captures the details and atmosphere of the artwork.

This is a self-portrait of the artist with her daughter Julie. Morisot was a leading member of the Impressionists, a group of French 19th-century artists who sought to capture the fleeting moments of everyday, modern life. Berthe Morisot was a woman belonging to the upper classes, and as such, it was not socially acceptable for her to visit public places without a chaperone. Male Impressionist artists often depicted people drinking, chatting and dancing in Paris’ public spaces –environments that Morisot did not have access to as a woman. Rather than allowing these social conventions to limit her artistic practice, she embraced the spaces she had access to, using her private, domestic environment as the setting of much of her work.

To read an essay about the social and cultural thresholds in 19th-century Paris by co-curator Katherine George, visit pages 64-67 on the Catalogue.