Berthe Morisot, fine French Impressionist

Berthe Morisot,

Wiki

Berthe Morisot (1841–95) was born into a very cultivated, bourgeois Bour­g­es family, dad a government minister and mum the great-niece of the famous Ro­c­oco artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Berthe and her old­er sis­ter, Edma, moved to Paris with the parents when they were still young. Though the girls were barred from a formal arts educat­ion, they fl­our­ished un­der pri­v­ate tutelage, making studies of Old Master paint­ings at the Louvre. Later they studied  en plein-air painting under the Barbizon painter Jean -Baptiste-Camille Corot.

Ed­ma’s skills were espec­ially prais­ed by Corot, but she gave up art to marry a naval officer. She moved from Paris, and the sis­ters stayed connect­ed via frequent and warm letters. In any case women painters were usually ig­nored or vilified, so these tal­en­ted sis­ters' future as profes­s­ional art­ists was always problematic.

The French Academy had always been re­sponsible for art theory, pr­ac­tice, politics and pat­ronage, but not on behalf of art­ists they disap­p­rov­ed of. So the Impress­ion­ists were eventually forced to ex­hib­it their work in­dep­endently in Salon des Refuses 1863, a show­ing of avant-garde works rejected by the Salon de Paris. Edouard Manet invited Morisot to exhibit and she did submit 9 works! In a review for Le Figaro, Albert Wolff merely noted 5 or 6 lunatics.

Nonetheless Corot continued to advise her, and his infl­uence was clearly seen in the landscape part of her canvas­es. In 1864 Ber­the submitted 2 of her works to the Salon de Paris, and were positively received by both critics and public. This, the annual exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was impressive.

Berthe and Edouard Manet were copying pictures in the Louvre during 1868; they became close pro­fes­s­ion­al coll­eagues and used each other as mod­els in their own work. Was it a deep friend­ship or a love affair? Morisot frequently sat for Edouard Manet and he disp­layed 3 of her works in his bedroom, beginning with The Bal­c­ony 1868, a vision in a white dress. Ber­the was in Eduard Manet’s home so much that she ended up mar­r­ying his bro­ther, Eugene in 1874 at 33. Eugène appeared in her later work, playing with their child, Julie

Most Impressionists used short, broken brush stokes but Ber­­the used large touches of paint applied fr­eely over the canvas. This gave her work a transparent, ir­id­escent quality eg Artist's mother and sister 1870. Im­pression­ist to be sure, in that their lines ceased to exist in nature.

Hide and Seek, 1873

Edma and her daughter

Like Degas and Cezanne, Morisot often chose pastels. The sketchy nat­ure that was so cen­tral to Impress­ionist art, and the emphasis on cr­eation ra­t­her than on the fin­ished work of art, made pas­tel an ideal med­ium for Morisot & colleagues. Pastels al­low­ed rapid strokes, easily altered by the fingers, making it even more suitable for Imp­r­ession­ism than water col­ours. See eg Portrait of Madame Pont­illon 1871, a sensitive sisterly pastel.

Most of her images centred on women, children and maids, in domestic settings. After the terrible losses suff­er­ed in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), France reassert­ed its int­er­est in healthy living, domestic­ity and bourgeois virtues. Her paintings always had a great sense of in­tim­acy eg The Cradle 1873. See her sister Edma who was still busy in mar­riage and babies. Edma was Berthe's fav­our­ite model, and looked Madonna-like as she rocked her baby to sleep.

The Cradle. 1873

Manet's salon evenings in Cafe Guerbois had been so import­ant ear­ly in the male Impres­sionists’ careers, but were clearly not suit­able for decent women. Fantin Latour pain­ted a gath­ering of men at the Ma­net's studio, A Studio in the Bat­ig­nol­les Quart­er, 1870. This group portrait became the first pub­l­ic manifesto of the group, so approp­riat­ely it in­cluded the artists and their literary friends in Man­et's stu­dio. Then Berthe eventually started having meetings in her home every Thurs night. Her art­ist friends and some writers found her home to be a centre of inspiration & social activity, and she was not excluded.

Fantin Latour A Studio in the Bat­ig­nol­les Quart­er, 1870

Bazille had his hands behind his back; Manet was painting; Renoir stood in front of frame; Monet was in back right corner.

  
Smell the fresh summer grass in her work Reading 1873 and feel the cool sun on sister Edma’s back. Strokes of light filled colour danced on the canvas surface. She read a book on the grass and an umbrella lay disc­arded, showing a fleeting moment of lei­sure, free of dom­es­ticity. Her subject’s blurred face was absorbed in the book.

 Reading 1873

It was becoming clear the Salon jurors disliked the Impressionists’ way of painting and would not accept their paintings. So the young artists, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Sisley and Pissarro, decided to rethink their plan. And this time Jean-Baptiste Millet, Jean-François Millet's brother, joined in. Gustave Caille­bot­te, who started out as a coll­ector, ended up half funding the project. They opened in April 1876 and took over 3 rooms in the Durand-Ruel Gallery, off Boulevard Haussman for 252 works!

In Reclining Woman in Grey 1879, a fashionable Parisian reclined on a settee, though her dress was almost misty. When light hit the strokes, they seemed wettish. Mor­isot was skilled in embodying her female subjects with real life, unlike Deg­as’ ball­er­inas or Manet’s nudes.

Art critic Louis Leroy wrote so rudely of their work that his derisive name for the art form, Impression­ism, stuck. In part­icular he singled out Renoir, Mon­et, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas and Morisot with vit­r­iol saying "It is unheard of, ap­pal­l­ing! I'll get a stroke from it".

See Morisot’s Sum­mer's Day on a Lake 1879. Pre­s­um­ably Leroy was used to represen­t­at­ions in which dist­ant and moving obj­ects were defined with exact detail. Like other Imp­ress­ionists, Mori­sot didn’t rely on her memory of ducks to tell her what they should look like. Rath­er she painted the actual momentary perception.

The Impressionist Ex­hibition did NOT make money, but Ber­the was so st­un­ned by the treatment they received, she re­m­ai­n­ed tot­ally faithful to the group forever. She’d bec­ame a close friend of Mary Cas­satt, the two women sympathising with each oth­er's struggles. And Pierre Renoir became her closest art friend

Morisot was frail after her daughter was born in 1878, but she ret­urn­ed to the Independent Exhibitions in 1880. Two lovely works evoked both images that she actually saw, AND symbolic works: Summer aka Young Woman by a Window 1878; and Winter aka Woman with a Muff 1880.

Winter, Woman with a Muff, 1880

Dallas

Like other Impressionists, Morisot used touches of colour to in­dicate form eg Eugene Manet and His Daughter in the Garden 1883. Her paint­ings gave the impression of qu­ick­ly recorded, transient moments from life as it was lived (in pleasant bourgeois families).

In the Dining Room 1886 was where Morisot applied bold brushstrokes around, giv­ing the sense of total free­­dom. And most of her paint­­ings were bathed in a luminous light, like Corot but with more comp­lex col­ours. Girl on a Di­van c1885 was another gentle scene bathed in light.

When Berthe's family went on holidays, she took her paints with her. Thus a few Morisot land­sc­apes app­ear­ed eg The Quay at Bougival 1883, Forest of Comp­iegne 1885 and other marine pic­t­ures done at Pontrieux. She be­came more influenced by Ren­oir.

In her last years, Morisot’s motion be­came more introsp­ec­t­ive. Her first solo show opened in 1892 where the rapid brush strokes that long defined her practice became clearer, and her images focused more. In Julie Dreaming (1894), Morisot’s red-headed teenage daughter stared, her face glowing against coloured streaks. Berthe died in Paris in 1895 from lung disease, at 54, and later that year, Degas arranged a memorial exhibition of Berthe's works.