Berthe Morisot: The Forgotten French Impressionist

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a painter in Paris who became known as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside two other female artists of the period - Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. For a brief time Berthe Morisot’s works outsold that of her more well-known male counterparts, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, but why has there been such a long wait for her true artistic genius to be acclaimed and recognized?

Berthe Morisot was born on January 14, 1841 in Bourges, France, into an affluent bourgeois family. Her father, Edmé Tiburce Morisot, was the senior administrator of the department of Cher. He also studied architecture at École des Beaux Arts. Her mother, Marie-Joséphine-Cornélie Thomas, was the great-niece of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, one of the most prolific Rococo painters. She had two older sisters, Yves (1838–1893) and Edma (1839–1921), plus a younger brother, Tiburce, born in 1848. The family moved to Paris in 1852, when Morisot was a child.

It was common practice for daughters of bourgeois families to receive art education, so Berthe and her sisters Yves and Edma were taught privately by Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne and Joseph Guichard. Morisot and her sisters initially started taking lessons so that they could each make a drawing for their father for his birthday but Morisot decided that she wanted to be an artist and pursued her goal with seriousness and dedication. 

In 1857 Guichard, who ran a school for girls in Rue des Moulins, introduced Berthe and Edma to the Louvre gallery where they could learn by looking, and from 1858 they learned by copying paintings. He also introduced them to the works of Gavarni. 

Joseph Guichard warned their mother, 'With natures like those of your daughters my teaching will not confer the meagre talents of genteel accomplishment, they will become painters. Do you have any idea what that means? In your milieu of the grande bourgeoisie it would be a revolution.’

Luckily Mme Morisot offered unstinting support to her artistic daughters. Her sister Yves married Theodore Gobillard, a tax inspector, in 1866, and was painted by Edgar Degas as Mrs Theodore Gobillard. As students, Berthe and Edma worked closely together until Edma married Adolphe Pontillon, a naval officer, Edma then moved to Cherbourg, had children, and had less time to paint once she became a wife. Letters between the sisters show a loving relationship, underscored by Berthe's regret at the distance between them and Edma's withdrawal from painting. Edma wholeheartedly supported Berthe's continued work and their families always remained close. 

Edma wrote “… I am often with you in thought, dear Berthe. I’m in your studio and I like to slip away, if only for a quarter of an hour, to breathe that atmosphere that we shared for many years…”

EDMA IN THE PARK

Morisot had registered as a copyist at the Louvre where she befriended other artists and teachers including Camille Corot, the pivotal landscape painter of the Barbizon School who also excelled in figure painting. In 1860, under Corot's influence she took up the plein air (outdoors) method of working. By 1863 she was studying under Achille Oudinot, another Barbizon painter. In the winter of 1863–64 she studied sculpture under Aimé Millet, but none of her sculpture is known to survive. 

In 1864, at the age of twenty-three, she exhibited two landscape paintings for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Sponsored by the government, and judged by Academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris. One Art Critic announced to his readers, 'You see, ladies, one may be an artist and take part in public exhibitions of painting and remain, as before, a very respectable and very charming person.’

 

Bertha Morisot continued to show regularly in six subsequent Salons, to generally favourable reviews, until 1873, the year before the first “rejected” Impressionist exhibition, held at the studio of the photographer Nadar, which included works by Morisrot, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. It would be Berthe Morisot who would draw Edouard Manet into this circle of painters that would later become known as "The French Impressionists".

Renoir, Pissarro and Monet had all enjoyed much less public success than Mademoiselle Morisot. Their way of doing things – all choppy lines and visible brushwork – gave their canvases an unfinished look that was anathema to the selectors at the Salon. Not only did their dabs and dashes seem impudent, but there was something menacing in their implied contempt for the established order. When critics referred to the group as 'the Impressionists’ it was originally meant as a term of abuse. Morisot exhibited with the Impressionists from 1874 onwards, only missing the exhibition in 1878 when her daughter was born. 

In 1874, Berthe Morisot married Eugène Manet, the brother of Édouard Manet. Eugene was also an artist but, unusually for the time, was prepared to sacrifice his own career in order to manage that of Morisot’s. It was a companionable and devoted marriage and their only child, Julie, posed frequently for her mother and other artists, including Renoir and her uncle Édouard.  

Before her marriage, Morisot had become good friends with Edouard Manet, who had painted several portraits of her, including a striking study in a black veil while in mourning for her father. Correspondence between them shows warm affection, and Manet gave her an easel as a Christmas present. To her dismay he interfered with one of her Salon submissions whilst he was engaged to transport it, mistaking her self-criticism as an invitation to add corrections.

 Manet wrote: "The young Morisot girls are charming. It's annoying that they are not men. However, as women, they could serve the cause of painting by each marrying a member of the French Academy and sowing discord in the camp of those dotards."

 

Although Manet is generally regarded as the master and Morisot as the follower, there is some evidence that their relationship and influence was reciprocal. Records show Manet's appreciation of her distinctive original style and compositional decisions, some of which he incorporated into his own work. It was Morisot who first persuaded Manet to attempt plein air painting, which she had been practising since having been introduced to it by Corot.

Morisot's mature career began in 1872 – just before she married. She found an audience for her work with Durand-Ruel, the private dealer, who bought twenty-two of her paintings. Morisot's work sold comparatively well during her own lifetime. She achieved the two highest prices at a Hôtel Drouot auction in 1875, The Interior (Young Woman with Mirror) sold for 480 francs, and her pastel On the Lawn sold for 320 francs. Her works averaged 250 francs, the best relative prices at the auction. Many years later in February 2013, Berthe Morisot became the highest priced female artist of all time, when After Lunch (1881), a portrait of a young redhead in a straw hat and purple dress, sold for $10.9 million at a Christie's auction. The painting achieved roughly three times its upper estimate.

Morisot’s works are almost always small in scale. She worked in oil paint, watercolours, or pastel, and sketched using various drawing media. Around 1880 she began painting on unprimed canvases—a technique Manet also experimented with at the time—and her brushwork became looser. In 1888–89, her brushstrokes transitioned from short, rapid strokes to long, sinuous ones that define form. The outer edges of her paintings were often left unfinished, allowing the canvas to show through and increasing the sense of spontaneity. After 1885, she worked mostly from preliminary drawings before beginning her oil paintings.

On the difficulty of painting the true likeness of nature, Berthe remarked: “I wear myself out trying to render the orange trees so that they're not stiff but like those I saw by Botticelli in Florence. It's a dream that won't come true but a love of nature is a consolation against failure.”

Morisot created a sense of space and depth through the use of colour. Although her colour palette was somewhat limited, her fellow impressionists regarded her as a "virtuoso colourist". She typically made expansive use of white, whether used as a pure white or mixed with other colours. In her large painting, The Cherry Tree, colours are more vivid but are still used to emphasize form. Morisot painted what she experienced on a daily basis. Her paintings reflect the 19th-century cultural restrictions of her class and gender. She avoided urban and street scenes and seldom painted the nude figure in her earlier days as such subjects were automatically closed to Morisot as a respectable single woman. There were limitations to how far she could accompany her male impressionist counterparts in their daring new journey into realism. 

“Real painters understand with a brush in their hand and it is important to express one’s self, provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.”    

 Like her fellow Impressionist Mary Cassatt, she focused on domestic life and portraits in which she could use family and personal friends as models, including her daughter Julie and sister Edma. Prior to the 1860s, Morisot painted subjects in line with the Barbizon school before turning to scenes of contemporary femininity.  Paintings like The Cradle (1872), in which she depicted current trends for nursery furniture, reflect her sensitivity to fashion and advertising, both of which would have been apparent to her female audience. Her works also include landscapes, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes. Later in her career Morisot worked with more ambitious themes, such as nudes. Corresponding with Morisot's interest in nude subjects, Morisot also began to focus more on preliminary drawings, completing many dry points, charcoal, and colour pencil drawings.

 

She always chose to exhibit under her full maiden name instead of using a pseudonym or her married name. In 1877, she was described by the critic for Le Temps as the "one real Impressionist in this group." In the 1880 exhibition, many reviews judged Morisot among the best, including Le Figaro critic Albert Wolff. Among other contemporary art critics such as Gustave Geoffrey the general view was that “no one represents Impressionism with more refined talent or more authority than Morisot"

Berthe Morisot died on March 2, 1895, in Paris, of pneumonia which she contracted while nursing her daughter Julie through the same illness.

JULIE MANET ROUART

The death of both her parents within a three-year period left Julie Manet orphaned at the age of 16. As a result, she came under the guardianship of the poet/critic Stéphane Mallarmé and went to live with her cousins. Bethe’s daughter also received support from, Renoir. In May 1900 Julie Manet married Ernest Rouart, artist and nephew of the painter Henri Rouart. The wedding, which took place in Passy, was a double ceremony in which Julie's cousin Jeannie Gobillard married Paul Valéry. 

Julie's memoirs, Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, were published in 1987 and provide insights into the lives of Morisot, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet, and Sisley, as well the 1896 state visit of Tsar Nicholas II and the Dreyfus Affair. 

Bertha Morisot’s work never lost its Manet-like quality—an insistence on design—nor did she become as involved in colour-optical experimentation as her fellow Impressionists. 

Delicate and subtle, exquisite in colour—often with a subdued emerald glow—her paintings won her the admiration of her Impressionist colleagues. However, like that of the other Impressionists, her work was also ridiculed by many critics. Commercially successful, she outsold Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. She was a woman of great culture and charm and she counted among her close friends Edgar Degas, Charles Baudelaire,
and Émile Zola, Despite Morisot being an acknowledged leader among Impressionist Artists, her work has tended to be overlooked and undervalued for more than a century. Only now are her paintings – exquisite essays in middle-class life that turn everyday acts into luminous moments – recognised as some of the most pivotal in modern art.

An early portrait of her by Edouard Manet – generally reckoned to be one of the best things he ever did – shows a young woman of shocking determination. Her face is all sharp planes and angles, topped by a tumble of jet-black curls. But it is the gaze that catches and holds you. Morisot stares out steadily at Manet, daring him to take her seriously as a fellow artist.

Portrait of Berthe by Manet

'I do not think any man would ever treat a woman as his equal,’ she wrote later in one of her notebooks, 'and it is all I ask because I know my worth.’

Paul Valéry, her son in –law and friend, put it best when he declared after her death, 'Berthe Morisot’s uniqueness was to “live” her painting, and to paint her life… she took up, put down, returned to her brush like a thought that comes to us, is clean forgotten, then occurs to us once again.’

It was perhaps the fact that Morisot died when her work was still developing that accounts for the way her reputation has declined sharply since her death. While Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas continued to build reputations that towered over the 20th century, Morisot’s work has tended to be written off by critics as that of a minor lady painter.

Throughout her career, Berthe Morisot had to fight against preconceptions of women and their role. She was highly unusual in her decision to be an artist as well as a wife and mother, but 

 many people inevitably saw her primarily in her

traditionally female roles. Although she has been forgotten in some corners, Morisot was an important figure in the founding of Impressionism as a movement; she participated in their first exhibition and was a key artistic and social figure within their circle. Morisot was also a strong encouraging influence on other female Impressionist painters living in Paris at the time.

Her apparently 'trivial’ subjects have blinded critics to the revolutionary way in which she broke up line and form, reassembling them in ways that are truer to the way our eyes interpret light and colour. Not only that, but her domestic subjects are infused with a depth of feeling and subtle ambivalence that keep you looking far longer than you intended. Fortunately, a new wave of scholarship is redressing the balance, returning to us a Berthe Morisot whose art is as radical and shocking as it is supremely beautiful. The book, 'Berthe Morisot’, by Jean-Dominique Rey (Published by Flammarion) urges us to take a fresh new look at Bertha Morisot’s life and work.