We're at the Musée d'Orsay, and we're looking at a painting by Berthe Morisot, The Cradle. This is a lovely painting of a baby in a cradle, being watched over by her new mother. Her later work is some of the most radical painting in its extraordinary brushwork. But this is an early canvas. This was exhibited at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1874. This is an exhibition of the artists whom we now call the "Impressionists", where they exhibited independently from the official art exhibitions in Paris. But sadly, this painting was little noticed by the press and the public, and remained unsold for several years, and in the family until 1930. It was extremely difficult to be a female painter at this time, and so it's not surprising that her work received little critical attention. There were some female painters that were successful. I'm thinking about Rosa Bonheur, for example. But, for the most part, especially women of Morisot's class. A woman of her level of affluence would have a quite restricted environment in which they could freely move. 

Women were expected to largely exist in the domestic sphere. And, as we see in the work of so many women artists at the end of the 19th century, a lack of access to the more typical subjects of modern life, of cafés and bars. This was the space that they had access to, and that's what they painted. And Morisot would go on to paint many beautiful scenes of family life, but this one is especially poignant. 

What we're seeing is Morisot's sister, looking over her daughter, and there's a wonderful intimacy. The child is angelic, draped under that gauzy net. And Morisot's sister looks down at her with a gentle concern that is really moving and beautiful. It recalls for me images of Mary, holding the Christ child. But, in those cases, Mary holds the Christ child on her lap. Here we have a very modern domestic setting, with a cradle, and a lovely interior in the background, with the curtain. And we have a sense of a modern woman in modern dress. Her lowered eyelids, the chin that rests on the hand, the other arm that comes forward, foreshortened across the cradle, suggests a contemplation about the serious responsibilities of motherhood, but also the incredible affection of motherhood. 

The fact that this is seen worthy as a subject for a painting, is also a reflection of the growth of the idea of the middle-class family in the 19th century. That the domestic space was a protected space, an insular space. And I think we see that here. Not only is the child enveloped in that gauzy material, but Morisot's sister herself is enclosed. On one side of her, she has the diagonal of that gauze. Above, another diagonal, formed by the curtain. And, to the left, the edge of the painting. So, she is also rather locked into this domestic space.

 I wanna spend just a moment looking at the brushwork. Although there are some fine linear passages that are almost drawn, for instance, the fine locks of hair that fall down the woman's temple. Much of the brushwork is quite loose and anticipates Morisot's later style. Look, for example, at the pink fringe, at the edge of the netting. Or the way in which the collar of the woman is rendered. There's a beautiful looseness here that shows Morisot's extraordinary facility with paint. Virtuosity is what comes to mind when I think of Morisot and the handling of paint. I notice it also in the white touches of paint that form the top of the curtain. Or even in her sleeve, those quick circular movements of paint, that suggest the texture of her dress. And, then there's choices that Morisot makes in terms of where our attention is going to fall. Look at the way in which the woman's fingers are painted so flatly. The upper parts of the fingers, which are foreshortened, are virtually not articulated at all. All that she's chosen to give us is the flat plains of the fingers, that are exposed directly to us. I love those fingers, their slight sense of fidgetiness. 

Unfortunately, I think we still have a tendency to discount images of mothers and children, to see them nostalgically and sentimentally. And, if we look around the galleries of the d'Orsay, almost every painting is by a man. Morisot is an exception. And, if we look at auction prices, if we look at the art market, female artists are still not given their due.

When Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day was exhibited in 1877 at the Impressionist Exhibition, one anonymous reviewer wrote, "Caillebotte is an impressionist in name only. He knows how to draw, and paints more seriously than his friends."

Well, you know, when we think of Impressionism, we think of the countryside, light-filled summer, loose brushwork, and Caillebotte has given us this complex image of the subtlety of light in the city after a rainstorm. And without all of that loose, open brushwork. This reviewer is saying he knows how to draw. There is a sense of line, of contours, of forms that exist three-dimensionally in space. That's not what the impressionists were doing in 1877.

At that same exhibition, one could have seen Renoir's Moulin de la Galette, which is full of light and movement and open brushwork. Or, paintings by Monet of the Gare Saint-Lazare, where Monet concentrated on the effects of light through the steam in that railway station. In fact, so much so that even the massiveness of the locomotive dissolved within that atmosphere, but here Caillebotte has given us a sense of massiveness. Look at the apartment buildings in the background. Look at the cobblestones. These are solid forms. Nothing's dissolving into brushwork or light here. And yet this painting is still all about light, but it's about its reflectivity. It's about shadow, and it's about the way that light can define forms in a far more solid way. 

Caillebotte is painting modern Paris, wide boulevards that had just recently been built, and the modern apartment houses that lined those boulevards. He's also giving us the middle class that then populated this city. Look at how fashionably dressed the couple in the foreground are. Although, we do seem to have some different types of people. If we look closely, we mostly see those fashionable, upper-class or upper-middle-class people, but behind the woman, to the right, just above her shoulder, we see someone who looks working class, and in the background, we see what looks like a painter carrying a ladder. And, in fact, that was really one of the definitions of the new modern city, was the way in which the lives of people of different classes crossed on the streets. This is a painting that really is about intersections. 

The rainy day, the yellowish-gray of the sky capturing a specific moment. Look at the sense of the reflectivity of the water between the cobblestones. This seems so spontaneous, as if this is this fragment of time, this moment. Nobody seems to be posed. The main figures aren't in the middle. Instead, the man on the right is actually cut off! We only see half his body. This would have been an aesthetic that would have failed, very much at odds with classical art, and perhaps even would have been seen as coming out of the new vision of the photograph. These are all things that would have felt very radical to an audience in 1877. 

And yet, although we don't notice it at first, the painting is really carefully balanced, and carefully composed. This is not a snapshot. If we look at the painting, it's divided into four quadrants. You've got that vertical division in the middle of the canvas. Then, right at the level of the woman's mouth, moving across, and then at the bottom of the apartment in the background. They've got a painting that was divided into four areas, and there really is a sense of stability and balance, even though it's still asymmetrical, for all the seriousness of the issues that we're talking about, this is a really playful painting. For instance, look at the man who's clearly in the middle ground, but seems to be hopping off the red wheels of that coach that we see in the background. There are these playful juxtapositions that Caillebotte is very intentionally placing in here that speaks to the way in which the modern world has become a complex jumble, the way in which things come together in relationships that are unexpected. And fragmentary and ephemeral, and these were all things that felt very modern in the 1870s. But he's having fun with them. Look, for instance, at the legs that are dangling from the umbrella held by the man in the center of the painting.

 So Caillebotte continued to paint urban themes, though he died rather young when he was in his 40s, and he was independently wealthy, and so had no need to sell his paintings. Throughout his life, he collected the work of his friends of the impressionists, and amassed, actually, a really remarkable collection that he left to the French state. His collection forms the heart of the great works that we see today at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.