Young Girl with a Cat
1889
Medium
Drypoint in black on cream laid paper
Dimensions
Image: 13.8 × 10.7 cm (5 7/16 × 4 1/4 in.); Plate: 15 × 12 cm (5 15/16 × 4 3/4 in.); Sheet: 27.2 × 20.1 cm (10 3/4 × 7 15/16 in.)
Classification
drypoint
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
4825
Art Historical Context
Berthe Morisot's *Young Girl with a Cat* (1889) captures an intimate moment of childhood innocence, a recurring theme in the French artist's oeuvre. As a pioneering Impressionist—one of the few women in the movement alongside her sister Edma and peers like Monet and Renoir—Morisot often depicted women and children in soft, everyday light. Created late in her career, just four years before her death, this small-scale drypoint reflects her shift toward experimental printmaking, blending her signature loose, evocative style with the medium's tactile immediacy. Drypoint, a direct intaglio techniq...
About the Artist
Berthe Morisot · 1841–1895
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was a founding member of the Impressionist movement and one of the most significant women artists of the 19th century. Born into an affluent bourgeois family in Bourges, France—her mother was a great-niece of the Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard—Morisot received serious artistic training despite the social constraints facing women of her class. Under the guidance of...