Mademoiselle Louise Riesener in a Hat

This pastel portrays Morisot’s friend, the daughter of Léon Riesener, a Romantic painter and a first cousin of Eugène Delacroix. Here she pays homage to the pastel portraits of her friend and mentor Edouard Manet, who had used the medium with exquisite spontaneity in the years leading up to his death in 1883. She restricted herself to the limited palette of Manet’s pastels, using only black and white, with touches of pink at the mouth and blue to enliven the eye.