Berthe Morisot
A Morisot family home on what was then the rue Franklin, where a studio was built in the garden for Berthe and her sister Edma.
16 rue Benjamin-Franklin
Still standing
Outside only
Someone else
The Morisot family house in Passy where a studio was built in the garden for Berthe and her sister Edma — an unusually serious commitment to two daughters' painting for a bourgeois family of the 1860s.
- 16 rue Benjamin-Franklin, 75016 Paris
- A Morisot family home, with a studio built in the garden
The place, briefly
The Morisots were a well-off family — the father was a senior civil servant — living in Passy, then a quiet district on the western edge of Paris. What makes them unusual is what they did about their daughters' painting.
Berthe Morisot and her sister Edma both trained seriously, and at this house the family had a studio built for them in the garden. For two daughters in the 1860s that is a substantial statement: not an accomplishment to be practised in the drawing room until marriage, but a working space. The mother reportedly received a warning from one of their teachers that the girls were becoming painters in earnest, and that this would be catastrophic in their social class. The family carried on regardless.
Edma gave up painting when she married in 1869. Berthe did not, and the difference between the two sisters is one of the clearest illustrations there is of what it cost a woman to keep working.
The house is private. The street, called the rue Franklin in Morisot's day, is now the rue Benjamin-Franklin.
Key facts
- rue Franklin
- Built in the garden for Berthe and Edma Morisot
- Passy, 16th arrondissement
- Trained alongside Berthe; stopped painting on marrying in 1869
- Private — exterior only
Timeline
A studio is built in the garden for the two Morisot sisters.
Edma Morisot marries and gives up painting.
On the map
Questions before you go
Did Berthe Morisot have her own studio?
Yes. At the family house on the rue Franklin, now the rue Benjamin-Franklin, a studio was built in the garden for Berthe and her sister Edma.
Who was Edma Morisot?
Berthe's sister, who trained as a painter alongside her and gave it up when she married in 1869. Berthe painted her often.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
12 rue Benjamin-Franklin
One of the Morisot family's Passy addresses during the years when Berthe and Edma Morisot were training as painters, a few doors from the house where their garden studio was built.
Visit the placePassy Cemetery
The small, wealthy cemetery beside the Trocadéro where Édouard Manet is buried in the family tomb — together with his brother Eugène and Eugène's wife, the painter Berthe Morisot.
Visit the placeChamp-de-Mars
The great park below the Eiffel Tower, and the site of the 1889 Exposition Universelle — where Claude Debussy heard Javanese gamelan for the first time and never entirely got over it.
Visit the place
57 rue Cortambert
The wooden Swiss-style chalet in Passy, since demolished, where Colette lived through her second marriage and the birth of her daughter.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.