Le Port de Nice (The Port of Nice)

Berthe Morisot

Oil on canvas

Musée Marmottan Monet

Le Port de Nice (The Port of Nice) is an oil on canvas painted by Berthe Morisot during the winter of 1881–1882, when she and her husband Eugène Manet spent several months on the Mediterranean coast. The composition depicts the harbor of Nice with characteristic Impressionist brevity: boats and buildings are compressed into a narrow horizontal band near the top of the canvas, while the lower portion is dominated by loosely rendered, animated water that resists pure representation. Morisot employed varied brushstrokes of differing length and texture to capture the shifting light and choppy conditions of the Riviera harbor, a technique that scholar Linda Nochlin described as making color and brushstroke the deliberate point of the picture itself. As one of the foremost figures of the Impressionist movement—having participated in nearly all eight of its group exhibitions between 1874 and 1886—Morisot demonstrated in this small but rigorous canvas her mastery of compositional logic beneath an apparently spontaneous surface.