Berthe Morisot

French, 1841 - 1895

BiographyBorn Bourges, Cher, 14 Jan 1841; died Paris, 2 March 1895).

French painter and printmaker. As the child of upper middle-class parents, Marie-Joséphine-Cornélie and Edme Tiburce Morisot, she was expected to be a skilled amateur artist and was thus given appropriate schooling. In 1857 she attended drawing lessons with Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne (fl 1838–57), but in 1858 she and her sister Edma left to study under Joseph-Benoît Guichard, a pupil of Ingres and Delacroix. In the same year they registered as copyists in the Louvre, copying Veronese and Rubens. The sisters were introduced to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot in 1861 and took advice from him and subsequently from his pupil, Achille-François Oudinot (1820–91). Through these artists they became familiar with current debates on naturalism and began to work en plein air, painting at Pontoise, Normandy and Brittany).

Morisot exhibited in the Salon from 1864 to 1868 and received encouraging reviews. In late 1867 or 1868, Henri Fantin-Latour introduced her to Edouard Manet, for whom she modelled, and who became her close friend. In December 1874 she married his brother Eugène. Although Manet advised Morisot on her work, she was never his formal pupil, and their relationship was more reciprocal than is usually supposed. Morisot was not persuaded by Manet to remain within the official exhibiting forum and was instrumental in persuading him to lighten his palette in the 1870s.

Morisot was a central member of the group of artists who initiated the Impressionist exhibitions in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1874 she submitted nine works to the first Impressionist Exhibition; thereafter she resolved never to return to the Salon. She showed in seven of the eight exhibitions (1874, 1876, 1877, 1880, 1881, 1882 and 1886), missing only the exhibition of 1879 due to illness following the birth of her daughter Julie at the end of 1878. She was directly involved in the organization of some of these exhibitions and identified strongly with the aesthetic and political principles that led to the establishment of an exhibition forum outside the Salon. In March 1875 Morisot participated with Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Monet and Alfred Sisley in an auction at the Hôtel Drouot, her works fetching marginally higher prices than theirs. Her work was handled by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, although she was never financially dependent on sales. Her home was a meeting-place for intellectuals and artists, including Renoir, Degas, Mary Cassatt and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Morisot was regarded by critics such as Paul Mantz (1821–95) and Théodore Duret as a quintessential Impressionist. They believed that she was capable of achieving an ‘impression’ of nature that was unmediated and ‘sincere’, and they asserted that such a proclivity was the product of the allegedly feminine characteristics of superficiality and innate sensitivity to surface appearances. However, Morisot’s use of luminous tonalities, painterly brushmarks, sketchy surfaces and unprimed canvas, and her adherence to modern-life subject-matter (e.g. Summer, 1880, Montpellier, Mus. Fabre) are features shared with her Impressionist colleagues, male and female.

Morisot executed pastels and watercolours throughout her life, as well as lithographs and drypoints around 1888 to 1890. In her last years she favoured suggestive and mythic subjects and increased linearity in drawing, as seen in the Cherry Tree.

Tamar Garb. "Morisot, Berthe." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T059646 (accessed March 7, 2012)

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