In 1881, Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot had a family residence built on Rue de Villejust, near Place de l’Étoile in Paris. Marthe Givaudan, the daughter of the building’s caretakers, posed for the artist several years later with Julie for Children at the Basin. The two girls are depicted in the sitting room of the townhouse—which includes an elegant folding screen with floral motifs shown in the middle ground. Standing in the foreground, the young girls are playing at angling. The blue and white Chinese porcelain bowl serving as their little fishing basin was a gift from Édouard Manet to the artist. The extremely free handling and incomplete state of the painting are characteristic of Morisot’s output in the mid-1880s. It is not impossible that the artist submitted this work to the last Impressionist exhibition, where one critic commented on “the drifting, sketch-like charm” seen in the Morisot‘s submissions (Maurice Hermel, La France libre, May 28, 1886).