What I see in it is a portrait, a figure study, a domestic interior, and also a wonderful
landscape so it has a very complex context for a viewer.
This is a painting of a little girl standing in a window on a snowy day in the winter and
looking out at what appears to be a snowfall on the trees outside the window.
She's about seven years old.
She has strawberry blonde hair and a wonderful blue dress with a red apron on it, and the
apron is what gives the painting its title, which is child in a red apron.
The artist is Bert Marisol.
She was a Parisian who lived in Paris all her life.
She was original in the way she thought about and looked at things, and she continued to
perfect her skills throughout her life, even with the restrictions of her social class.
Those restrictions were significant for a woman in the 19th century from an upper middle-class
family.
She really couldn't go into theaters or city cafes and paint street scenes, but she had
access to her own domestic life, and she owned that life.
She painted the interior of her own home.
She painted her family on vacation.
She painted landscapes, and she often included figures.
At a certain time in her life, when she was already successful as a painter, she had her
child, her first child, her only child, this beautiful daughter, Julie, and Julie becomes
one of the great light motifs in Marisol's mature work.
She uses brushes in a calligraphic way.
That is, she makes marks with them that tell us something.
They're not random marks, or they may look hurried, or instantaneous, or spontaneous.
They're actually very specific to what she wants to depict.
With the trees outside, and the trees are very barren, remember it's winter, she uses
a much more stark and specific spare brushstroke to mark the barks of the trees, but for the
snow that falls on top of those branches and catches, it's a feathery stroke.
It resembles the way we think of snow, as a softness like snow.
We get a real sensation of a brightness, and moisture, and color that represents nature
as it appears to us, as it attracts us, if we were to look out that same window.
The special thing about this view is that it feels as if we have entered a very interesting
space, and we are actually the ones who are looking at Julie, looking out the window.
The artist gives us the opportunity to see what she sees through her own eyes, as we
approach the back of her child.
It's an important room, it was actually Barrett Marisol's own bedroom, in a house that she
and her husband, Eugène Manet, designed for their family.
The effectiveness of the painting for me is that she succeeds on every level in the construction
of architecture that puts us inside of a bedroom, in the evocation of a streetscape
with chimneys and smoke coming out of them across the street, in the landscape of the
trees, in the child's movement and in her stillness.
It seems to the viewer, I think, at first glance to be a snapshot.
But it is so much more than that.
It's actually a very intimate and fluid painting of modern life.
