Landscape (Tree-trunks near a River)

Landscape (Tree-trunks near a River) is a delicate drypoint print created by the pioneering French Impressionist Berthe Morisot in 1888. This late-19th-century work exemplifies Morisot’s extended engagement with graphic media, offering an intimate glimpse into the natural world that often preoccupied her later career.

Though widely celebrated for her oil paintings and luminous watercolors, Morisot experimented extensively with printmaking, particularly drypoint. The technique involves scratching directly into a copper plate with a sharp needle, creating displaced metal—known as the burr—along the edges of the lines. When inked and printed, this burr yields a soft, velvety texture that gives this specific piece a hazy, atmospheric quality, distinguishing it from the harder lines characteristic of traditional etching.

The composition focuses tightly on a dense cluster of tree-trunks that dominate the foreground, emphasizing their vertical power and suggesting the immediate proximity of a forest edge. Morisot utilizes the inherent contrast of the monochromatic print medium to capture the subtle effects of light filtering through the canopy and reflecting off the nearby river. The handling is quick and impressionistic, prioritizing the feeling of the observed moment rather than meticulous detail. This approach aligns perfectly with Impressionist principles, translating the effects of shifting light and air into a graphic format.

The expressive freedom demonstrated in this small-scale work confirms Morisot’s unique ability to find poetic depth in everyday natural subjects. This important print is held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Because of its age and artistic significance, high-quality prints and reproductions of this drypoint are widely available through public domain collections, ensuring continued access to this facet of Morisot's remarkable output.