Under the Orange Tree (Sous l'oranger)

Berthe Morisot was probably the greatest female artist in the Impressionist movement and showed in all but one of the Impressionist exhibitions. This painting represents her daughter Julie (who also appears in Renoir's "Flowered Hat"), who became her favorite subject in the last two decades of her life. Julie appears in the garden of Morisot's winter home near Nice in the south of France. The setting is an exotic one with over-arching orange trees and Julie's pet green parrot in a birdcage to the left. As a well-off bourgeois woman (and therefore subject to rules of suitable public behavior), Morisot was unable to travel around Paris without an escort and, as a result, focused largely on domestic scenes.