The archive / Impressionism / The Harbor at Lorient
The Harbor at Lorient
Berthe Morisot · French, 1841–1895
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3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 18×24″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 40×60″.
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THE WORK
She gave the whole middle to the water.
Find the figure and you find her shoved to the far left: Edma, the artist's sister, seated on the harbour parapet under a parasol, painted thin and quick. Everything else is open. The wide silvery expanse of sea and sky takes the entire centre of the canvas, the boats reduced to brown and grey notes along the quay. A salon picture would have set the sitter dead centre and finished her face. Morisot does the opposite, an asymmetry so off-balance it reads almost like a snapshot, and the real subject becomes air and water.
WHY IT MATTERS
She painted from the only ground she was allowed.
Read what the picture is doing structurally, not as some gift of temperament. A sea-wall, a garden, a balcony: these were the vantages a respectable bourgeois woman could occupy in public, and Morisot built a body of modern painting from exactly those edges. The barrier was institutional. Women were not admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts, so she studied privately, with Corot among her teachers, then exhibited as the only woman in the first Impressionist show of 1874 and in seven of the eight that group held. She turned a constraint into a signature point of view.
LOOK CLOSER
Manet thought it her best, and kept it for life.
When Morisot brought this canvas back to Paris, she gave it to Édouard Manet — a fellow painter and her close colleague — and he judged it among the finest things she had done. He kept it the rest of his life; it stayed in his hands and passed down through the family afterward. That is the measure to hold onto here: a painter at the centre of the new art looked at the loose figure, the off-centre parasol, the great quiet middle of water, and read it as a peer's best work, not a beginner's. The two argued and learned from each other as equals. She had the eye; he knew it.
I do not think any man would ever treat a woman as his equal, and it is all I ask because I know my worth.Berthe Morisot, notebook, 1890
The file & the facts
- Title
- The Harbor at Lorient
- Artist
- Berthe Morisot
- Year
- 1869
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 43.5 × 73 cm
- Collection
- National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · open access · National Gallery of Art, Washington — Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.48 (CC0, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
