Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895)

Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges, a town in central France, in 1841 and moved with her family to Paris in 1852. Raised in a well-connected, upper-middle class family, Morisot started taking drawing lessons in her teens. In Paris, Morisot and her sister Edma trained under Joseph-Benoit Guichard and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and furthered their studies by copying Old Master paintings at the Louvre. Berthe and Edma were clearly gifted, but it was considered inappropriate for women in their upper-middle class milieu to become professional artists. Recognizing the girls’ potential, Guichard warned their mother of the social scandal that would come with success. She dismissed the warning, however, and continued her girls’ studies. Morisot first exhibited paintings in the Paris Salon in 1864 where she would continue to exhibit until 1873.

Morisot became close friends with the artist Edouard Manet and his family, going on trips and attending social gatherings at each other’s’ homes, where she became acquainted with such artists as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Carolus-Duran, Alfred Stevens, Edgar Degas, and Eva Gonzalès. At Degas’s invitation, Morisot became one of the founding members of the avant-garde group that came to be called the Impressionists. In 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, she married Manet’s brother, Eugène, at the age of 33. Unlike her sister Edma, who stopped painting when she married in 1869, Morisot continued her career while being a wife and mother, a rare feat for women seeking professional careers in the arts.

Morisot exhibited with the Impressionists in seven of their eight exhibitions, only missing one due to health complications following the birth of her only child, Julie, in 1878. She gained great critical success with her light-infused, boldly painted depictions of bourgeois women and children in refined settings and was recognized in her time as one of the leaders of the movement. Relegated to work in the domestic sphere on account of her gender and elevated social class, Morisot often relied on family and friends to model for her work. She continued to paint and exhibit until the end of her relatively short life, developing a more expressive and lyrical style from the late 1880s forward. In 1892, the Parisian gallery Boussod, Valadon et Cie, mounted her first solo exhibition and in 1894, the French state purchased her Young Woman Dressed for the Ball (Musée d’Orsay) for the Musée du Luxembourg. The following year, at the age of 54, Morisot died suddenly of pneumonia. Although she was an essential figure in the development of modern art in the 19th century, Morisot is less well known today than her peers Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others.

Kelsey Martin and Nicole Myers, DMA exhibition text Women Artists in Europe from the Monarchy to Modernism, 2018.

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