Modern Age
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895)
French Impressionism painter.
Berthe Morisot was a founding member and one of the truest talents of the Impressionist group — a fact long obscured by her sex and her class. Born into a cultivated bourgeois family, she and her sister Edma trained as painters under a pupil of Corot, and Berthe alone made it her life. She met Édouard Manet, became close to his circle and later married his brother Eugène, and in 1874 she joined the first independent exhibition rather than continue courting the official Salon. She went on to show in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, missing only 1879, the year after her daughter Julie was born.
Her subject was the world she was permitted to move in: women and children in drawing rooms and gardens, at the mirror, in the nursery, on a summer boat — the private, domestic sphere of modern femininity, painted from the inside. What makes the work radical is not the subject but the handling: rapid, open, seemingly unfinished brushwork, high-keyed whites and silvers, and edges left frankly incomplete, so that the picture keeps the freshness of a thing seen in passing. Contemporaries who accepted her as an equal, among them Mallarmé, prized exactly this daring lightness.
Morisot's correspondence — with Edma, with the Manets, with Stéphane Mallarmé — survives and is published, and it records both her aesthetic ambitions and her sharp awareness of the limits placed on a woman who wished to be taken seriously as an artist. She died in Paris in 1895 at fifty-four; her death certificate listed no profession. Only in later generations was her place at the center of Impressionism fully restored.
The words the record keeps using: airy, intimate, fresh, delicate, spontaneous, luminous.
At a glance
- Lived 1841–1895
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Pastel, Watercolor
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Broken color, En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- The Cradle, 1872 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Morisot's sister Edma gazes down at her sleeping infant behind the gauzy veil of a cradle — the picture that helped launch Morisot at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. It is one of the earliest Impressionist… - Woman at Her Toilette, 1875 (Art Institute of Chicago)
A woman seen from behind arranges her hair before a mirror, her bare shoulders and pale gown dissolving into a haze of silver, lilac, and pearl. Morisot turns a private, unglamorous ritual into a study in… - Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight, 1875 (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris)
Painted on the couple's honeymoon, this shows Morisot's new husband Eugène Manet seated indoors, gazing out through a window at a harbor of little boats and a passing woman and child. It quietly reverses convention: the… - Summer's Day, 1879 (National Gallery, London)
Two fashionable young women drift in a small boat on a lake in the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian pleasure-park, one glancing off to the side as ducks paddle past. It is a quintessential Impressionist image of modern…
What was said
Morisot's notebooks and letters record her ambition to seize and hold something of the fleeting, everyday life around her — a passing gesture, the light of a moment — with the greatest possible freshness and economy of touch, valuing the vitality of the sketch over laborious finish.
In her private notebooks Morisot reflected bitterly that a woman was rarely allowed to be treated as an equal, which was all she asked, being sure of her own worth as an artist — a recurring theme in her writing about her place in the art world.
Morisot's correspondence records her dismay when Édouard Manet, invited to give advice on one of her Salon canvases, took up a brush himself and reworked it extensively — an episode that captures both his powerful influence on her and her determination to keep her own hand.
Lineage
Learned from Édouard Manet
What would Berthe make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Berthe Morisot", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Berthe · Keep a life moment the way Berthe would · Pictures made after Berthe