Berthe MORISOT
Bourges 1841 - Paris 1895
Biography
The daughter of a civil servant, Berthe-Marie-Pauline Morisot and her older sister Edma received lessons in drawing from the Lyonnais painter Joseph-Benoit Guichard and registered as copyists at the Louvre. The sisters also earned the support and encouragement of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, a friend of the Morisot family, and through him continued their training with the landscape painter Achille Oudinot. They began to paint outdoors at Pontoise, as well as at Beuzeval in Normandy and in Brittany. Berthe showed her work for the first time at the Paris Salon of 1864 and continued to exhibit there until 1868. Through Henri Fantin-Latour she met Edouard Manet, who encouraged her in her work, although she was never a pupil of his. The Manet and Morisot families became friendly, and Berthe became one of Manet’s favourite models, posing for such paintings as The Balcony and Repose. Manet also painted her portrait ten times between 1868 and 1874. In 1874 Morisot was invited by Edgar Degas to take part in the first Impressionist exhibition, where she was the only woman to be included. (Her decision to take part in the first Impressionist exhibition was taken against Manet’s advice.) Although the exhibition famously attracted considerable critical and public derision, a number of art critics praised Morisot’s work.
In December 1874, Morisot married Edouard Manet’s younger brother Eugène, and the following year the couple spent some weeks in England, at Cowes on the Isle of Wight and in London. Choosing to abandon the Salon, Morisot was to participate in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions - missing only the fourth, on account of the birth of her daughter Julie – and exhibited drawings in pastel and watercolour alongside oil paintings. Morisot adopted the freedom of handling characteristic of Impressionist landscape paintings, but applied it to figure paintings, portraits and domestic subjects. It was this fluidity of brushwork and sensitivity of colour that struck most observers. In a review of the second Impressionist exhibition, held in 1876 at the Galerie Durand Ruel on the rue le Peletier in Paris, the critic Paul Mantz wrote: ‘The truth is that there is only one Impressionist in the group at rue le Peletier: it is Berthe Morisot. She has already been acclaimed and should continue to be so. She will never finish a painting, a pastel, a watercolor; she produces prefaces for books that she will never write, but when she plays with a range of light tones, she finds grays of an extreme finesse and pinks of the most delicate pallor.’
Morisot became friendly with several artists, including Degas, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt, as well as the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. In May 1892 she had what was to be the first and only solo exhibition in her lifetime at the Galerie Boussod et Valadon in Paris. The exhibition included forty paintings and numerous drawings, watercolours and pastels, and received positive reviews. In 1893 Morisot exhibited two paintings at the Association pour l’Art in Antwerp and one at the New English Art Club in London, and the following year showed four works at Le Libre Esthétique in Brussels. In 1894 Mallarmé arranged to have one of her paintings acquired at auction by the State for the Musée de Luxembourg.
Following the death of Eugène Manet in April 1892, Morisot devoted most of her time to raising Julie, painting and drawing her as she grew into a teenager. Devoted to her daughter, the artist nursed her back to health after Julie was struck by the flu in February 1895, but in so doing became ill herself and died just a few days later, at the age of fifty-four. The day before her death, the artist wrote a letter to her daughter: ‘My dearest little Julie, I love you as I die; I shall still love you when I am dead; I beg you, do not cry; this parting was inevitable. I had hoped to be with you until you married…Work and be good as you have always been. You have not caused me any chagrin in your young life. You have beauty, money; make good use of them…Do not cry; I love you more than I can tell you.’
After Morisot’s death, the contents of her studio were not dispersed at auction but were retained by her family. A year later, in March 1896, a posthumous exhibition of her work, organized by Degas, Monet, Renoir and Mallarmé, was held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. This large retrospective exhibition, which included 174 paintings, fifty-four pastels, sixty-seven drawings, sixty-nine watercolours and three sculptures by the artist, was a great critical success. Today, a large and significant group of paintings and works on paper by Berthe Morisot is in the collection of the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris; a posthumous bequest in 1996 made by the widow of the artist’s grandson Denis Rouart.
