Berthe Morisot - Peasant Girl among Tulips 1890
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Peasant Girl among Tulips 1890
64x71cm oil/canvas
Dixon Gallery and Gardens Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, United States
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From Dixon Gallery and Gardens Memphis:
In 1890, Morisot, her ailing husband, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Julie, spent half the year in Mézy, a village in the French countryside, where they hoped the fresh air would help restore Eugène’s health. Morisot painted Peasant Girl among Tulips that spring, seeing in the sturdy features of a French peasant girl, believed to be named Gabrielle Dufour, the fragile beauty of a tulip. Morisot consciously rhymed the swirling brushwork in the girl’s unadorned dress with the swirling forms of the tulip leaves. The wisps of hair curling away from her face are like spent tulip petals about to fall to the ground. Even the girl’s delightful oval face is shaped like a tulip blossom. Her hands, stained brown from working in fields, connect her to the rural French countryside, a virtuous place capable of producing lovely flowers and lovely young girls.