Berthe Morisot
Self-Portrait (1885)
Berthe Morisot
“Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.”
– Berthe Morisot
On Monday, March 2, 1896, four of the greatest artists of the 19th century, three painters and one poet, came together. It was the one year anniversary of the loss of an artist they had greatly respected—a friend that had been taken too soon. Her work, they believed, needed to be seen… her important role as one of the founding members of the Impressionist movement remembered. So they… Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and Stéphane Mallarmé put down their brushes and their pens and personally supervised the hanging of over 400 paintings by Berthe Morisot.
Born in Bourges, France in 1841, the great-great-niece of the acclaimed Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Morisot was showing in Salon de Paris by the age of 23. Her teacher, Joseph Guichard, had been right when he warned of her and her sister to her parents, “Given your daughters’ natural gifts, it will not be petty drawing-room talents that my instruction will achieve; they will become painters.” A painter she was. And, for almost a decade, Morisot consistently showed in the Salon until leaving to join the “Rejects” of Impressionism.
Eugene Manet on the Isle of Wight (1875)
Berthe Morisot
And while these great artists considered her equal—admired her art and often proudly exhibited beside her during her lifetime, almost 45 years passed before another major retrospective was held of Berthe Morisot’s work at the Musée de l’Orangerie… another 46 before Berthe Morisot: Impressionist was put together by Mount Holyoke College and the National Gallery of Art in D.C. For a time, she was all but written out of the story of Impressionism, though during her life she was one of the biggest players of the avant-garde movement.
While I knew her name and very little of her story, I became increasingly interested in Berthe Morisot’s work when I visited the High Museum’s European Masterworks: The Phillips Collection and found her painting to be the only work included by a female artist. To my delight, when I mentioned my new fascination, my friend Peggy shared that she had something for me. When we met for coffee, she arrived with the original catalogue from the Morisot retrospective in 1987… She had been so moved by her art that she had saved the catalogue for all those years. Luckily for me, she had also just returned from seeing Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist put together by the Barnes Foundation, Dallas Museum of Art, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec and the Musée d’Orsay and had picked me up a catalogue as well.
Après le Déjeuner (1881)
Berthe Morisot
Jeune Fille au Bal (1875)
Berthe Morisot
Julie Daydreaming (1894)
Berthe Morisot
For the past few months, I have picked up these catalogues weekly and been drawn into her art and into her story. While sometimes I feel I get lost in an artist’s work, with Morisot’s I always felt more like I was coming home to myself. I found her improvisational style and loose brushstrokes grounding and the way she included oil, water and pastel paint all in one painting fascinating. A “virtuoso colorist,” Morisot’s pieces always had such life to them. And because she believed “it is important to express oneself…provided that feelings are real and are taken from your own experience,” she painted what she knew—her friends, her family, her full life. Her art depicted the joy and beauty of everyday moments, and her personal expression through art helped to keep her own melancholy at bay.
Today, I find myself thinking of Julie, Berthe Morisot’s daughter and often model, seventeen years old by the time of Morisot’s memorial retrospective in 1896. I imagine her heart was heavy as she wrote the labels to accompany her mother’s work. It was from Julie that Morisot had contracted pneumonia, and her father had died only a couple years before. In addition to sadness and loss, I imagine Julie quite capably working alongside these men to create her mother’s memorial retrospective. She had to be proud of the legacy her mother had created. I am glad for both of these women that Berthe Morisot is starting to get the recognition she so deserves.