Berthe Morisot was a founding member of the Impressionist group and one of its most important participants, contributing to all but one of the Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Working alongside Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the casual elegance of Morisot’s compositional style and her confident, sophisticated application of paint not only helped define the aesthetic of the movement, but also set her apart as one of its foremost protagonists. The only female member besides the American, Mary Cassatt, Morisot brought a valuable, idiosyncratic perspective to avant-garde art at the turn of the century. Denied the same privileges as her male counterparts, her paintings provide insight into aspects of French society and provided a platform for ‘feminine’ subjects and concerns that remained unexplored by her male colleagues. As an integral member of the Parisian avant-garde, she explored themes of modernity, class and gender through the prisms of contemporary bourgeois and family life, and the liminal spaces of the female sphere. The models for her paintings were mostly women and children, many of whom were members of her own family, and they posed for her with a level of ease and familiarity that was rarely seen in 19^th century portraiture.

Jeune femme se levant, executed in 1886, depicts a young, semi-clothed woman sitting in front of a mirror, and lost in a state of reverie. Wereas the male artists presented their nude female figures as objects of masculine artistic interest and scrutiny, in contrast Morisot conveys a measured sense of interiority and psychological intensity that elevates her subject. Through her delicate lines, evanescent sense of light and highly sophisticated handling of paint, Morisot creates an intimate, contemplative scene that retains the sketched aesthetic of Impressionist works yet also powerfully demonstrates a uniqueness and clarity of vision.

From an early age, Morisot was set upon an artistic path. In 1857, her mother organised drawing lessons for Berthe and her sister Edma, and held salons frequented by artists such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Edgar Degas, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edouard Manet and James Tissot. Nevertheless, Morisot’s pursuit of an artistic career was hindered by her gender. An early tutor wrote that, with further instruction, Morisot’s innate talent would propel her beyond the “drawing room accomplishments'' deemed acceptable for a bourgeois woman, warning her parents that “in the upper-class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary, I might say almost catastrophic” (quoted in D. Rouart, The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, New York, 1957, p. 14). In this light, it is a testament to Morisot’s talent that in 1864, at the age of only 23, two of her paintings were accepted into the Salon, and by the mid-1870s she was a leading Impressionist.