Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)
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Berthe Morisot was the only woman amongst the founding members of the Impressionist movement. She was the daughter of a highly placed Government Official and the Granddaughter of the well known painter, Jean-Honore Fragonard. Encouraged by her parents she began studying art with her sister Edma at a very young age.
She began by copying masterpieces from the Louvre and then began painting with the famous landscape painter Camille Corot who was to become a close friend. He taught her the ‘plein air’ technique. She took her studies very seriously and under the guidance of Corot she even travelled around the Pyrenees on a mule with her sister in order to draw and paint.
She began exhibiting at the Salon at a young age in 1864 and her first two paintings were of Landscapes. However, after a meeting with the painter Edouard Manet, she abandoned the painting techniques she learnt from Corot and even went so far as to destroy a number of the paintings that she had produced during her time with him. Manet was to have a great influence on her and her on him. She was to feature in a number of famous paintings by him such as ‘Balcony’ and ‘Repose’.
She married Edouard Manet’s brother Eugene, who was also a painter. He was relatively wealthy and this gave her the financial security she needed to continue with her painting. She had a child by him whom they named Julie. She was to paint her daughter many times as well as other members of her family such as her nieces and her sister Edma. Some of the paintings of her family were considered very daring and intimate for the time, For example, she painted a number of portraits of her sister when pregnant. The famous painting, entitled ‘The Cradle’ which caused a sensation at an exhibition, showed her sister with her new born daughter and now hangs in the Musee d’Orsay.
Her meeting with some of the founding members of Impressionism such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir was to change her life in an artistic sense. They believed that her way of painting, her vibrant brush strokes and use of colour and the light made her a perfect exponent of the Impressionist technique.
Her husband, Eugene, sadly died at a young age but her friends who included by then such people Renoir, Degas and other members of the Impressionist group rallied around to support her. She was an extremely cultured woman and her other friends included masters of other forms of art, such as the great poet Baudelaire and the writer Emile Zola. Although she spent much time with her Impressionist friends, she was never really to partake in an important part of their social life, which was of course, the cafes of Paris. As a woman of a certain standing it was not the done thing to frequent such cafes, even for a woman as independent as Berthe.
The year 1874 was a defining moment for her, against the advice of Edouard Manet and a number of other friends she decided not to exhibit at the Salon and instead took part in the first independent exhibition of Impressionist painting. This led to strong differences of artistic opinion with her friend and one time mentor Edouard Manet, as he refused to exhibit with the Impressionists, wanting to achieve success in the normal and orthodox way by exhibiting at the Salon. She exhibited in every Impressionist exhibition at the time, apart from the year when she gave birth to her daughter.
At the time she achieved extraordinary success, as her paintings outsold those by Renoir and Monet. It was also a time when Impressionism was ridiculed by many. She was therefore a sort of rebel of her time. Not only was it extremely unusual for women to exhibit professionally in the male driven art world but she also was to do so in a manner, that at the time drew her contempt and scorn.
In 1892 she had her first solo exhibition and in 1894 the French State commissioned a painting by her entitled ‘Young Woman in an Evening Dress’. She sadly died of pneumonia at the age of 54 and following her death, her friends, Renoir and Degas arranged a retrospective of her work.
Her role in art history is an important one, not only was she the only woman among the founding members of Impressionism but her paintings also recorded the life of bourgeoisie woman in nineteenth century France. As with all paintings by the Impressionist group of painters her paintings are worth an enormous amount of money.