Morisot, Berthe

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MORISOT, BERTHE

MORISOT, BERTHE (1841–1895), French artist.

Berthe Morisot was one of the core members of the French art movement known as impressionism. Born in 1841 into an upper-middle-class family, she received a traditionally feminine education. Trained at home and with private tutors, her curriculum included drawing.

By the time she was in her late teens, it was clear that she and her sister Edma were exceptionally gifted and ambitious, qualities noted with some trepidation by her teachers Joseph Guichard and the famous Barbizon painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. In the mid-nineteenth century, respectable young ladies were not supposed to appear in public alone, but because Berthe and Edma Morisot painted together, they managed to work consistently for about twelve years, out-of-doors as well as in their home. Tapping into a strong amateur feminine image-making tradition that had been gaining momentum since the late eighteenth century, they painted scenes of everyday feminine life, primarily portraits, domestic interiors, and family vacation spots. As the Morisot sisters astutely understood, this imagery corresponded to a program for pioneering, avant-garde art, famously formulated by Charles Baudelaire in his The Painter of Modern Life, published in 1863. Baudelaire called for art to abandon academic standards of history painting in favor of modern urban subject matter.

Through their painting, Berthe and Edma came into contact with the circle of young Parisian artists and writers who were putting Baudelaire's ideas into practice. In particular, they became close friends with the brilliant leaders of a new generation, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Manet painted several beautiful portraits of Berthe. Barred by bourgeois convention from participating in the café encounters during which the principles of realism and impressionism were debated and developed, the Morisot sisters nonetheless assimilated the latest trends through their personal network.

Between about 1869 and 1872, Berthe went through a crisis, initiated by the obligation felt by her sister Edma to give up art in order to marry and have children, and deepened by the military and political events shaking France, and especially Paris, during 1870 and 1871. Berthe Morisot emerged from this crisis with a decision to become, in effect though not in name, a progressive professional artist. She also decided to marry Eugéne Manet, brother of the painter Édouard. Against Edouard Manet's advice, she accepted Degas's invitation to join an 1874 exhibition intended to circumvent the authority of the French Academy of Fine Arts. This exhibition, later known as the first of eight impressionist exhibitions held over the course of twelve years, launched impressionism.

In the first impressionist exhibition, Morisot showed a painting that epitomized her early work: The Cradle, painted in 1873. It shows a mother and baby, painted with light, varied, and expressive brushstrokes to render a time-honored subject in a thoroughly modern way. The image, scaled for a middle-class interior, is at once secular, tender, and analytical. Mother and baby each occupy their own areas of the image, one in full light, the other veiled, but are connected to each other compositionally, as well as by the mother's gaze and gesture.

Although critics noted the participation of a woman in the impressionist movement, their reaction was rarely negative, and indeed Morisot's colleagues seem to have never questioned her right to belong at the heart of their group. Instead, critics tended to praise Morisot's art for what they perceived as its femininity, which they saw in its subject matter, as well as in its delicate, scattered, and brightly colored style. As impressionism matured, Morisot's work evolved along with the movement. Gradually her style became more sinuous and strongly colored. She experimented with self-portraiture, and with a series of portraits of her only child, Julie, born in 1879. In these later

works, Morisot explored her child's progress toward autonomy, and the melancholy of loss, especially in paintings made after the death of her husband in 1892.

Morisot also participated in the impressionist movement through her and her husband's personal, administrative, and financial support. She continued to be a close friend of the impressionist painters Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir for the rest of her life, and earned the admiration and friendship of the great symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Morisot died at the age of fifty-four in 1895, from influenza caught while caring for her daughter.

Many of Morisot's works remained in her family at her unforeseen death, and many others remained in private collections. This seclusion of her work, compounded by a bias in art history against women, caused Morisot's reputation to decline until textbooks no longer even included her in their account of impressionism. Morisot's reputation has also been plagued by recurrent attempts to cast her primarily as the painter Édouard Manet's muse and mistress. Beginning in the 1980s, feminist contributions to art history, together with a growing general respect for Morisot's subject matter and achievements brought about by changing attitudes to gender, have restored Morisot to the place of honor she occupied in her own lifetime. The single largest collection of her work is to be found in the Paris Musée Marmottan.