Peonies - Berthe Morisot (c. 1869)

Berthe Morisot from the National Gallery of Art

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art

Peonies is a compact and luminous floral still life painted by Berthe Morisot around 1869, depicting a bouquet of peonies rendered with the loose, animated brushwork characteristic of French Impressionism. The painting's intimate scale and vibrant handling of color reflect Morisot's early mastery of the still-life genre, which she explored alongside her better-known figurative and landscape subjects. Morisot was a founding figure of the Impressionist movement, exhibiting in seven of the eight landmark Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, and remains one of the most significant French painters of the nineteenth century. Now held in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the work entered the museum as a gift from Paul Mellon in 1994 after having been unknown to scholarship until 1980, when it was discovered sharing a stretcher with another Morisot canvas.