Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (* January 14, 1841 in Bourges; † March 2, 1895 in Paris), also Berthe Manet, was a French Impressionist painter.
She came from a wealthy French family and received private instruction in painting and drawing. In the 1860s, she was a student of Camille Corot. However, she rejected the conventional style of her teacher and opted for the Impressionist style of painting.
She had a close friendship with the painter Édouard Manet, who portrayed her repeatedly between 1868 and 1874. For all her rapprochement with Manet, however, she retained an independent style, often characterized by light colors and a strong emphasis on graphic means.
Berthe Morisot was the first woman in the group of Impressionists. In 1874 she participated in the first Impressionist exhibition with nine works and was represented at all exhibitions of this group until 1886, with the exception of 1879. In December 1874 she married Eugène Manet, Édouard Manet's brother. The following year their daughter Julie Manet was born.
Berthe Morisot preferred to paint family scenes, portraits of women and children, interiors and landscapes, among which are often coastal paintings. Berthe Morisot, together with the American artist Mary Cassatt, is considered the most important painter of the late 19th century.
Berthe Morisot's Life and work
Family background
Berthe Morisot was the daughter of Tiburce Morisot and Marie Cornélie Thomas. The latter came from a family of respected and high-ranking French administrators. Tiburce Morisot's ancestors, on the other hand, were artisan families.
Thanks to the influence of his father-in-law, Tiburce Morisot, who had married the sixteen-year-old Marie Cornélie in 1835, obtained a position in the French financial administration in 1836 and proved himself there to such an extent that after only four years he rose to become prefect of the Cher administrative district. In 1846, he was promoted to officer of the French Legion of Honor for his achievements.
His stellar career, during which he lived with his family in Valenciennes, Bourges (Berthe Morisot's birthplace), Limoges, Caen, Rennes and, from 1851, finally in Paris, ended initially with the beginning of the second French Empire under Napoléon III. On July 5, 1852, he was dismissed from the French army.
July 1852, he was dismissed from the service and it was only thanks to a renewed intervention by the Thomas family that years later he was given the somewhat less influential job of Conseiller référendaire à la Cour des Comptes (Legal Advisor to the Court of Accounts).
The family thus belonged to the upper French middle class. In addition to Tiburce Morisot's professional income, she had a private income thanks to Marie Cornélie Thomas's inheritance.
The family was thus wealthy and Berthe Morisot was never forced to sell her works or pursue art as a profession to earn a living, as other women in the arts were.
The marriage of Tiburce Morisot and Marie Cornélie Thomas produced a total of four children. Berthe Morisot, born on January 14, 1841, was the third daughter. Her sister Yves Morisot was born in 1838 and Edma Morisot was born in 1839. The year of birth of her only brother is not known exactly. He was born sometime between 1845 and 1848.
Childhood and youth
Little is known about Berthe Morisot's childhood. She herself only mentions an English governess in her later written notes.
All three sisters received art lessons. In addition to piano, singing, and conversation lessons, this was part of the standard education for daughters from the French middle class at the time, who were to be enabled to perform a piano piece or song for guests at an evening party or to portray their family and family scenes passably.
Art classes for young women focused on drawing and small-scale works in gouache and watercolor. Unlike oil painting, this did not require an elaborate studio, and the financial outlay for lessons in watercolor painting was much lower, at no more than fifty francs annually.
In contrast, the annual upkeep of a professional painter's studio, in which the large-format paintings were created as they were shown in the Paris Salon, amounted to two to three thousand francs.
For the art lessons that bourgeois and aristocratic daughters received, a private tutor was usually hired. Even such distinguished painters as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jacques-Louis David taught painting to young women. Professional art instruction, on the other hand, as offered in prestigious art schools, was not open to women at the time. It was not until 1897 that the École des Beaux-Arts became the first art academy in France to give in to the great demand from women to study art.
Of the Morisot daughters, only the two younger ones - Berthe and Edma - developed a more intense interest in painting.
Their first drawing teacher was the academic genre painter Geoffrey-Alphonse Chocarne and, between 1857 and 1860, the painter Joseph Guichard, who sometimes urged his pupils to copy the masterpieces in the Louvre. From 1860 Camille Corot began to teach the two sisters. To their mother, however, the already famous painter wrote a warning before starting the lessons:
With characters like those of your daughters, my lessons will make them painters [and] not insignificant, talented amateurs.
Do you realize what this means? In the world of the "grande bourgeoisie" in which you move, this is a revolution, I would even say a disaster! Are you really sure never to curse one day the art that, after entering this so respectable, peaceful house, will be the only master over the destiny of your two children?
Early relations with the French art scene
At the evening parties that Marie Cornélie Thomas gave every Tuesday in her house, artists were regularly among the invited guests. In addition to Camille Corot and the composer Gioachino Rossini, who lived in the neighborhood of the Morisot family, the painters with whom the Morisot sisters Berthe and Edma had become acquainted were also present.
Already during their studies in front of the masterpieces in the Louvre, the sisters had been introduced to the painter Félix Bracquemond, whose wife Marie Bracquemond is today also counted among the important Impressionist painters of the 19th century.
Félix Bracquemond in turn introduced Edma and Berthe Morisot to the painter Henri Fantin-Latour, and Camille Corot introduced the sisters to a number of painters who were part of the Barbizon school. From 1863, Achille François Oudinot, who belonged to this school of painting, took over from Camille Corot for some time the instruction of the two Morisot sisters.
During the same period, the sisters became acquainted with Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran and the portrait painter Alfred Stevens, who was very successful during the early 1860s. In the winter of 1863/64, Berthe Morisot also studied sculpture with Aimé Millet. Sculptures by Berthe Morisot from that period, however, have not survived.
Among Berthe Morisot's most influential acquaintances in the 1860s was Adèle Colonna, a Swiss woman who had married into the Roman aristocracy but whose husband died just six months after their marriage.
Widowed and wealthy, Adèle Colonna settled in Paris and broke the social conventions of her time by beginning to work professionally as a sculptor. In 1863, Marcello, as Adèle Colonna called herself, was successfully represented at the Paris Salon with three sculptures, among others. Berthe Morisot later described her acquaintance with Adèle Colonna, which began in 1864, as one of the most important in her life.
Anne Higonnet, in her 1995 biography of Berthe Morisot, emphasizes above all that the role that Adèle Colonna lived in her profession and society radiated on Morisot. Unlike George Sand and Rosa Bonheur (these two women had gained recognition as writers and artists in the generation before), who behaved "symbolically like men," Adèle Colonna rejected such behavior.
Although with sculpture Adèle Colonna had chosen a creative field that - even more than writing and painting - was considered a field of activity reserved for men, she attached great importance to being perceived and treated as a woman. Her work alone was to be compared with that of men.
In 1868, Henri Fantin-Latour introduced Édouard Manet to the two Morisot sisters. Édouard Manet, whose paintings had already caused such a sensation, was already known to the sisters through his work. He and his two brothers, Eugène and Gustave, belonged to similar social circles of the French upper bourgeoisie as the Morisot family.
The older generations of the Manet family had also served the French state in high administrative positions. All three brothers drew an income from the family's inherited fortune that provided for their livelihood.
Like Marie Cornélie Thomas, Eugénie-Désirée Fournier, the Manet brothers' mother, gave evening parties at which the Morisot family were now regular guests. At one of these soirées, Berthe Morisot met, among others, Edgar Degas, who was important for her further artistic development.
First exhibitions
1864 stellten sowohl Edma als auch Berthe Morisot jeweils zwei Bilder im Pariser Salon aus. Für Berthe Morisot war die Präsentation ihrer beiden Landschaftsbilder der erste Schritt auf dem Weg zu einer professionellen Malerin. Dass die beiden Schwestern kurz nach dieser Ausstellung ein großes Atelier auf dem Gelände ihres Elternhauses errichten ließen, kann kaum dem Zufall oder einer Laune zugeschrieben werden.
Der Pariser Salon galt als die wichtigste französische Kunstausstellung jener Zeit. Es lag im Ermessen einer konservativ zusammengesetzten Jury zu entscheiden, welche Gemälde dort dem Publikum präsentiert werden sollten. Auf dem Pariser Salon ausstellen zu können, gute Kritiken in der Presse zu erhalten und möglicherweise sogar einen Preis zu bekommen, war für einen Maler ein sicherer Weg zu finanziellem Erfolg.
Abgelehnte Bilder hingegen waren selten zu verkaufen. Der Maler Jongkind soll dann dem Käufer das Honorar für ein von der Jury abgelehntes Gemälde erstatten müssen.
The fact that Berthe Morisot painted relatively small formats that could be easily hung may have contributed to the acceptance of her paintings. By contrast, the established painters of France's art academies sometimes submitted paintings that measured three by six meters.
Berthe Morisot's paintings stood out among those of her female contemporaries because of the high quality of their execution, and neither the choice of colors, painting technique, nor the subjects chosen provoked rejection by the jury. All this did not apply to the paintings submitted by their contemporaries, who were later also counted among the Impressionists.
Artists such as Monet, Manet, Renoir, Bazille, and Sisley had little chance of being exhibited at the official Paris Salon because of their view of art, which differed from that of the conservative academies.
For this reason, they had already shown their paintings in 1863 at the sensational Salon des Refusés (Art Exhibition of the Rejected). Édouard Manet's work Breakfast in the Green and James McNeill Whistler's painting Girl in White caused a scandal there with their unusual subjects and modern painting style.
Although the jury hung the paintings of Edma and Berthe Morisot in such a way that even her mother had trouble finding them among the multitude of other paintings, the jury continued to accept most of the paintings submitted by Berthe Morisot in the following years. In 1865, 1866 and 1870 she was represented at the Paris Salon with two of her works, and in 1868, 1872 and 1873 with one each. However, there is also certain evidence that the jury rejected one of the paintings she submitted in 1872 and even several in 1874. Apart from the exhibitions at the Paris Salon, both Berthe Morisot and her sister Edma submitted paintings to art exhibitions in the French provinces. In 1867, Alfred Cadart, one of the first gallery owners of the 19th century, presented a selection of paintings by the two sisters in the window of his gallery.
In 1886 Morisot changed her painting style, and in 1892 her first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Boussod et Valadon to great acclaim.
Edma Morisot marriage
On March 8, 1869, Edma Morisot, now thirty years old, married the French naval officer Adolphe Pontillon and moved to Brittany, where her husband was stationed. Edma Morisot gave up her artistic ambitions with the marriage.
Only two paintings by her have survived: a landscape painting and a portrait of her sister Berthe painting. According to art historian Anne Higonnet, however, these two paintings show that Edma Morisot was on the same high artistic level as her sister.
For Berthe Morisot, too, the marriage of her sister Edma marked the end of a significant period in her life. Edma had shared her artistic ambitions; together they had gone on painting excursions or visited the Louvre to copy the old masters. As the daughter of a middle-class family, it was not possible for Berthe Morisot to do all this on her own now.
The social conventions of her time required her, as an unmarried and still young woman, to always be accompanied in public. The separation from her sister therefore meant a considerable encroachment on her personal freedom.
In addition, she was increasingly exposed to pressure from her family to also marry. She increasingly questioned her decision to pursue an artistic career. To her sister Edma she wrote in the fall of 1869:
I am sad and worse, everyone is leaving me. I feel lonely, disillusioned and old to boot.
Relationship with Édouard Manet
Berthe Morisot became close friends with Édouard Manet after her sister's marriage. The relationship with the artist, who was married to Suzanne Leenhoff, was most likely of a purely platonic nature.
The two usually only met in situations where other people were also present. Unlike most of her contemporaries, Berthe Morisot was convinced very early on that Édouard Manet towered above the circle of contemporary painters.
It is difficult to assess, however, what influence this realization had on her own work. It is striking, however, that she painted less in the first years of her friendship with Édouard Manet than in the years before.
At the very beginning of their acquaintance, Édouard Manet asked Berthe Morisot to sit for him.
This request was unusual, because daughters of respectable families had their portraits painted by artists, but they did not serve as the actual model and subject of an artist. Usually, female models at that time belonged to the lower class and were often sexually available to their patrons.
However, during the last three decades of the 19th century, it became increasingly common for artists to choose their friends, relatives, and acquaintances as subjects for their works.
To maintain due decorum, Berthe Morisot was usually accompanied to Édouard Manet's studio by her mother Marie Cornélie Thomas. In total, the artist depicted Berthe Morisot in eleven oil paintings and one watercolor.
These paintings were not intended for the art trade - seven of them remained his property until Manet's death. The remaining works, namely four oil paintings and the watercolor, came into the possession of close friends or proven art connoisseurs who were close to Manet.
The first painting by Édouard Manet to show Berthe Morisot is The Balcony, a group portrait inspired by Goya's Maja on the Balcony. Berthe Morisot can be seen in it together with Manet's acquaintance Antoine Guillemet and the violinist Fanny Claus.
It was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1869, where it met with mixed reactions. All later portraits in which Berthe Morisot is depicted by Édouard Manet are clearly more intimate. The follow-up painting, titled The Resting Berthe Morisot, shows a woman dressed in white, lost in thought, reclining on a sofa.
This picture finds its counterpart in the painting Eva vor der Staffelei (Eva in front of the easel), which was created almost at the same time. Eva Gonzalès, the subject of this portrait, belonged to a similar social class as Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet, but was six years younger than Morisot. Morisot asked Édouard Manet to teach Eva Gonzalès painting.
The relationship between Berthe Morisot and Eva Gonzalès was not always unclouded, however. In a letter to her sister Edma, Berthe Morisot complained: "Manet preaches to me and holds up the inevitable Mademoiselle Gonzalès as an example; she knows what she wants, is persistent, and also knows how to put her ideas into practice, while I am incapable of anything. Meanwhile, she sits [as a model] for him every day..."
Berthe Morisot planned to submit two paintings to the Paris Salon of 1870. One of them, The Port of Lorient, is, according to Berthe Morisot's biographer Anne Higonnet, one of the early highlights of Berthe Morisot's oeuvre.
Masterfully executed in perspective, balance, and color harmony, individual sections of the painting are seemingly only fleetingly executed and unfinished. In its entirety, the painting gives the traditional impression of a landscape flooded with light. The depth effect that is awakened is astonishing.
Berthe Morisot achieves this effect thanks to the use of a novel painting technique: dynamically textured surfaces that make the brushstroke evident, and by juxtaposing saturated colors. Édouard Manet also praised the high quality of the painting. The situation was different, however, with the second painting that Berthe Morisot wanted to submit.
It shows Berthe Morisot's mother reading next to Edma sitting on the sofa. The dimensions of this work are 101 by 82 centimeters. Thus, it is much larger than most of Morisot's other paintings.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, one of the family's painter friends, criticized what he saw as the unsuccessful heads. Berthe Morisot then asked Édouard Manet for advice.
The latter found the painting to be in order; he only found fault with the lower edge of one of the dresses.
With the help of Berthe Morisot's palette and brushes, he first added a few small accents, but did not leave it at that: ...once he was at it, there was no stopping him; after the dress he took on the bosom, after the bosom the head, and finally the background.
He cracked joke after joke, laughed like a maniac, handed me the palette, took it from me again; by five o'clock in the afternoon we had created the best caricature ever to be seen.
According to Higonnet (1995), Morisot suffered from the consequences of this treatment. She doubted whether she should actually exhibit the painting. Her hope that the jury would reject the painting was not fulfilled.
Her mother managed to get the painting back, but its withdrawal would make it clear to Edouard Manet how much he had overstepped his bounds. The strain also manifested itself in increasing physical exhaustion. Ultimately, both paintings were successfully shown at the Paris Salon.
Morisot's work is distinguished by its color compositions. On March 2, 1895, Morisot died in Paris of pneumonia.