Berthe Morisot

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was born on January 14, 1841, in Bourges, a city in central France where her father, Edme Tiburce Morisot, served as a senior government administrator ^[1]. Her mother, Marie-Josephine-Cornelie Thomas, came from a cultivated family; a long-repeated tradition connects the household to the Rococo painter Jean-Honore Fragonard, though the exact link remains uncertain ^[2]. The family moved several times during Berthe's childhood before settling in Passy, then a leafy suburb on the western edge of Paris, where she would live for most of her life.

The Morisot parents gave their daughters the drawing lessons expected of well-bred girls, but Berthe and her sister Edma took the training far beyond ornament. Their teacher Joseph Guichard, a former pupil of Ingres, reportedly warned their mother that the girls' talent could make them professional painters, an outcome he considered close to a catastrophe for a family of their standing ^[1]. The warning proved accurate in one sense: both sisters committed themselves seriously to art.

Because the state art school, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, did not admit women until 1897, Morisot pieced together her education privately. She copied Old Masters in the Louvre, where she registered as a copyist in 1858, and from about 1860 she studied landscape painting outdoors under Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, one of the most respected landscape painters in France ^[2]. Corot's example, painting directly from nature with a soft, silvery touch, shaped her earliest independent work.

Morisot made her public debut at the Paris Salon of 1864, showing two landscapes, and she continued to be accepted there regularly through the early 1870s ^[1]. For a young woman with no access to formal academies, steady Salon acceptance was a real achievement, and critics began to notice her fresh handling of light. Her sister Edma exhibited alongside her until 1869, when Edma married a naval officer and gave up painting, a loss Berthe felt keenly and that sharpened her own resolve to continue ^[3].

A meeting in the Louvre in 1868, arranged by the painter Henri Fantin-Latour, brought Morisot into the orbit of Edouard Manet, the most argued-about painter in Paris ^[2]. The two became close friends and artistic allies. Morisot posed for Manet repeatedly, most famously in The Balcony (1868-69), and their exchange of ideas ran in both directions: she absorbed his bold, modern figure painting, while her commitment to working outdoors is often credited with encouraging his later, lighter plein-air manner ^[3].

Morisot stayed in Passy through the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870-71, an experience that strained her health, and she resumed painting with new intensity afterward ^[1]. By the early 1870s she had moved decisively away from Corot's muted tones toward a brighter palette and a broken, sketch-like touch. In 1872 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become the great commercial champion of Impressionism, bought work from her, an early sign of professional standing ^[4].

In 1874 Morisot took a decisive risk. She abandoned the official Salon and joined Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and Cezanne in the independent group exhibition held at the photographer Nadar's studio, the show that gave Impressionism its name ^[1]. She was the only woman among the founding exhibitors. Among the works she showed was The Cradle (1872), a painting of Edma gazing at her sleeping infant that has become one of the most reproduced images of the movement; it now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay ^[5].

Her loyalty to the group was nearly total. Of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886, Morisot took part in seven, missing only the 1879 show, which fell shortly after the birth of her daughter ^[2]. Any list of Berthe Morisot achievements has to begin with this record: she helped organize, fund, and sustain the exhibitions, hosting weekly gatherings that kept the often-quarrelsome painters in conversation. Guests at her Thursday evenings included Degas, Renoir, Monet, and the poet Stephane Mallarme, who became one of her closest friends ^[3].

Morisot's subject matter was shaped by what a respectable woman could observe. Barred by convention from the cafes and boulevards her male colleagues painted, she turned the settings available to her, drawing rooms, gardens, seaside verandas, and nurseries, into serious modern art ^[6]. Works such as Woman at Her Toilette (about 1875-80), Summer's Day (1879), and In the Dining Room (1886) treat private female life with a speed and freedom of brushwork that some critics found more radically unfinished than anything by Monet. She also worked as a draftsperson and printmaker, producing drypoints and lithographs, and in her last decade made extensive colored-pencil and watercolor studies ^[4].

Recognition came in her lifetime. Reviewers of the group shows, even hostile ones, regularly singled her out; the critic Gustave Geffroy ranked her among the movement's essential figures ^[4]. In 1894 the French state bought her painting Young Woman in a Ball Gown for the Musee du Luxembourg, the national museum of living artists, a rare official honor for any Impressionist and rarer still for a woman ^[2].

In December 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, Morisot married Eugene Manet, Edouard's younger brother ^[1]. The marriage gave her something few women painters of her era possessed: a husband who accepted, and actively supported, her career. Eugene, himself a sometime painter and writer, handled practical arrangements for her exhibitions and never asked her to give up her work. She continued to sign her paintings Berthe Morisot rather than adopting her married name professionally.

Their only child, Julie Manet, was born on November 14, 1878 ^[3]. Julie became her mother's most constant model, appearing in dozens of paintings and drawings from infancy through adolescence: playing with a goat, holding a doll, reading, practicing the violin. Through these works Morisot built one of the most sustained visual records of a single childhood in nineteenth-century art. Julie's own diary, kept from 1893 and later published, remains a key source on the Impressionist circle ^[3].

The household in the rue de Villejust, where the family settled in the 1880s, doubled as a salon. Renoir painted Julie's portrait, Degas argued about art in the drawing room, and Mallarme, after Eugene's death in 1892, became Julie's unofficial guardian and Morisot's trusted adviser ^[2]. Financially secure and socially established, Morisot never needed to sell paintings to live, yet she worked with a professional's discipline, painting nearly every day and destroying work that failed to satisfy her.

The 1880s brought both consolidation and change to Morisot's art. Her brushwork grew longer and more rhythmic, influenced in part by Renoir's draftsmanship and by her renewed study of eighteenth-century French painting ^[4]. She traveled with her family to the Isle of Wight, Nice, and the Low Countries, painting harbor scenes and orchards, and in 1887 she exhibited with the avant-garde group Les XX in Brussels, extending her reputation beyond France ^[2].

Eugene Manet's health declined in the early 1890s, and he died in April 1892 ^[1]. Weeks later, Morisot's first solo exhibition opened at the Boussod, Valadon et Cie gallery in Paris. The show gathered several dozen paintings, pastels, and watercolors, and it confirmed her position in the front rank of living French painters ^[4]. Widowed at fifty-one, she moved with Julie to a smaller apartment and kept painting, producing late canvases of Julie and her cousins that are among her most freely handled works.

In the winter of 1895 Julie fell ill with influenza. Nursing her daughter, Morisot contracted the illness herself, which developed into pulmonary congestion. She died in Paris on March 2, 1895, at the age of fifty-four ^[1]. Her death certificate listed no profession, a bureaucratic silence that has struck later historians as a summary of the era's blindness. She was buried in the Cimetiere de Passy beside Eugene and Edouard Manet. The following year Durand-Ruel mounted a memorial exhibition of roughly 400 of her works, organized by Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Mallarme, a measure of the esteem her colleagues held for her ^[5].

For much of the twentieth century, surveys of Impressionism treated Morisot as a gifted satellite of Manet rather than a central figure. That judgment has been reversed. Scholars including Anne Higonnet, Kathleen Adler, and Tamar Garb re-examined her career from the 1980s onward, and major retrospectives, notably the 2018-19 exhibition organized by the Musee d'Orsay, the Barnes Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, presented her as one of the movement's inventors ^[6]. Basic Berthe Morisot facts, such as her participation in seven of the eight group shows, now anchor any serious history of Impressionism.

Her paintings hang in the Musee d'Orsay, the Musee Marmottan Monet (which holds the largest single collection, built partly on gifts from Julie Manet's descendants), the National Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington ^[5]. The market has followed the scholarship: in 2013 her canvas Apres le dejeuner sold at Christie's in London for 6.9 million pounds (about 10.9 million dollars), then a record price at auction for a work by a woman artist ^[7].

Any Berthe Morisot biography ultimately turns on a double accomplishment. She helped work out the visual language of Impressionism, the broken stroke, the high-keyed color, the sense of a moment caught in passing, and she did so while proving that the supposedly minor world of domestic life could carry the full weight of modern painting. Painters and historians alike now read her interiors and gardens not as a limitation accepted but as a territory claimed ^[6].