Maureen C. O’Brien
Curator
In the winter of 1886, the neighborhoods of Paris were transformed by an unusually heavy snowfall that lingered on the branches of trees and captured the imagination of the artist Berthe Morisot. A founding member of the independent painters’ collaborative a critic had dubbed the “impressionists,” Morisot shared the group’s interest in painting scenes of modern life in a style distinguished by broken brushstrokes, flattened spatial relationships, cropped points of view, responses to fleeting light and atmosphere, and an absence of academic drawing and modeling.