Founding Impressionist who showed in seven of the group's eight exhibitions — more than anyone but Pissarro — and whose largest collection now hangs at the Musée Marmottan Monet.
Berthe Morisot was a French painter and one of the founders of Impressionism. She showed in the group's first exhibition in 1874 and in every one after it except the year she was recovering from childbirth: seven of the eight. Only Camille Pissarro, who was in all eight, appeared more often.
She was born at Bourges on 14 January 1841 and died in Paris on 2 March 1895, aged fifty-four.
Her subject was the world she was permitted to be in: drawing rooms, gardens, nurseries, women dressing, a wet nurse feeding a baby, her daughter Julie growing up. She painted it in thin, fast, visibly unfinished-looking strokes that critics of the 1870s took for incompetence and that painters afterwards took for the point.
She modelled for Édouard Manet fourteen times before marrying his younger brother Eugène in 1874. Her death certificate recorded her occupation as none.
Berthe Morisot was born on 14 January 1841 at Bourges, in central France, where her father Edme Tiburce Morisot was a senior civil servant. The family moved to Paris in 1852 and settled in Passy, then a wealthy district on the western edge of the city.[1]
The family tradition held that they were descended from the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Genealogists have not been able to confirm it, and the claim is now generally treated as family legend rather than fact.
Berthe and her sister Edma were given drawing lessons, as was normal for girls of their class, on the assumption that it would stop at accomplishment. Both of them took it further than that. Their teacher Joseph Guichard is said to have warned their mother that the daughters would become painters, and that in her social position this would be a catastrophe.
Women were not admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts until 1897, so Morisot trained the way women had to: privately, and by copying in the Louvre, where she registered as a copyist in 1858.[2]
From about 1861 she worked with Camille Corot, the landscape painter, who took her seriously and taught her to paint outdoors from the motif. Corot's influence on her handling of light and on her grey-green tonality is visible for the rest of her career.[3]
She had two pictures accepted by the Salon in 1864, when she was twenty-three, and went on showing there for a decade. Her sister Edma married a naval officer in 1869 and gave up painting, which Berthe took hard; the letters between them are one of the best surviving records of what it cost a woman to keep working.
Morisot met Édouard Manet in 1868, in the Louvre, and the two families became close. Over the next six years he painted her fourteen times.[4]
She is the woman in white seated at the front of The Balcony, painted in 1868 and 1869, holding a fan against the green railing. Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, from 1872, is the best known of the portraits: black dress, black hat, black eyes, painted almost entirely in black and grey. It hangs at the Musée d'Orsay.[5]
The influence ran both ways, which is often left out. Morisot persuaded Manet to try painting outdoors, and his lighter palette of the 1870s follows her practice rather than the other way round. She also refused his advice when she disagreed with it, including his habit of retouching her canvases, which she found infuriating.
On 22 December 1874 she married his brother Eugène Manet. It was a marriage that left her free to work, and Eugène organised exhibitions and dealt with dealers on her behalf. The couple later built a house at 40 rue de Villejust, near the Bois de Boulogne.
When the group of painters rejected by the Salon organised their own exhibition in April 1874, in rooms on the boulevard des Capucines, Morisot was one of them. She was the only woman among the founders, and she was warned that showing with them would damage her reputation. She showed nine works, including The Cradle, a picture of her sister Edma watching her sleeping baby through a veil of muslin. It now hangs at the Musée d'Orsay.[6]
It was at that exhibition that the critic Louis Leroy coined the word Impressionist, as an insult.[7]
She exhibited in six of the seven later group shows, missing only the one of 1879, when her daughter Julie had just been born. That made seven of the eight in all. Only Camille Pissarro, who was in every one, appeared more often.[8]
Critics treated her work as slight, and often praised it in terms that were a way of dismissing it: feminine, charming, delicate. The painters did not. Renoir, Degas, Monet and Mallarmé were regular guests at the Thursday dinners she and Eugène held, and Renoir made drawings of Julie.
Morisot's brushwork is the loosest of the group. She left canvas bare, let a single stroke stand for an arm or a fold of cloth, and stopped before the surface was covered. Her pictures often look like the underpainting of somebody else's finished work.[9]
This was a decision and not a shortcut, and she defended it. She worked in oil, watercolour and pastel, and she used the same open handling in all three. The late canvases are looser still: Le Cerisier, painted in her last years and now at the Musée Marmottan Monet, is barely held together.
Her subjects were restricted by what a woman of her class could go and look at. She could not sit in a café or a bar alone, so she painted what she had: her sister, her daughter, servants, gardens at Bougival, boats seen from a balcony, women at their mirrors. The narrowness is real, and inside it she produced about four hundred paintings.[10]
Morisot's daughter Julie Manet was born on 14 November 1878 and became her mother's principal model for the rest of her life. There are paintings of Julie as an infant, as a child with a greyhound, reading, at the piano, and finally as a young woman.
Julie kept a diary from the age of fourteen. It is now one of the main sources on the private life of the Impressionists, because Renoir, Degas, Mallarmé and Monet were all in and out of the house.[11]
Eugène Manet died in 1892. Morisot had her first solo exhibition the same year.
Berthe Morisot caught influenza from her daughter in the winter of 1895 and it turned into pneumonia. She died in Paris on 2 March 1895, aged fifty-four, and is buried in the Passy cemetery in the Manet family grave.[12]
Her death certificate gave her profession as none. She had been a professional exhibiting painter for thirty years. Renoir, hearing of her death, is reported to have said: poor Madame Morisot, the public hardly knows her.
Julie, then sixteen, was left in the care of Stéphane Mallarmé as her guardian. Degas, Monet, Renoir and Mallarmé organised a memorial exhibition of about three hundred works the following year.
The Musée d'Orsay holds The Cradle and Manet's portrait of her with a bouquet of violets.[13]
The largest collection is at the Musée Marmottan Monet, in the house by the Ranelagh gardens in Paris. In 1993 the descendants of Julie Manet, the Rouart family, bequeathed twenty-five oil paintings and some seventy-five watercolours, together with pastels and drawings. The museum describes the result as the world's leading collection of her work.[14]
Morisot is one of the four or five painters who made Impressionism, and for most of a century she was written about as an appendix to Manet. The record does not support that. She was in the first exhibition and nearly all the rest, her handling was more radical than his, and the shift in his palette after 1870 follows her.
The second claim is about subject matter. The Impressionist canon is full of public Paris: bars, boulevards, racecourses, theatres. Morisot painted the interior of the same society: the nursery, the dressing room, and the women doing the domestic work that made the boulevards possible. She is the only member of the founding group who saw it from inside.
Born at Bourges on 14 January, daughter of a senior French civil servant.
The family moves to Paris and settles in Passy, then a wealthy district on the western edge of the city.
Begins drawing lessons with Joseph Guichard alongside her sister Edma.
Registers as a copyist at the Louvre, the training route open to women, who are barred from the École des Beaux-Arts.
Begins working with the landscape painter Camille Corot, who teaches her to paint outdoors from the motif.
Has two paintings accepted by the Salon at twenty-three.
Meets Édouard Manet in the Louvre. The two families become close.
Poses for Manet's The Balcony, seated at the front in a green dress.
Her sister Edma marries a naval officer and gives up painting, a loss Berthe records at length in their letters.
Manet paints Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, almost entirely in black and grey.
Paints The Cradle, showing Edma watching her sleeping baby through muslin.
Shows nine works in the first Impressionist exhibition in April, the only woman among the founders.
Marries Eugène Manet, Édouard's younger brother, in December.
Shows in the second Impressionist exhibition.
Shows in the third Impressionist exhibition.
Her daughter Julie Manet is born in November.
Misses the fourth Impressionist exhibition, the only one she does not take part in, while recovering from the birth.
Returns to the group exhibitions and continues in every one that follows.
Édouard Manet dies. Morisot helps organise the memorial exhibition of his work.
Shows in the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, alongside Mary Cassatt and Georges Seurat.
Holds Thursday dinners with Eugène at which Renoir, Degas, Monet and Mallarmé are regular guests.
Paints repeatedly at Mézy, west of Paris, working in oil, watercolour and pastel.
Eugène Manet dies.
Holds her first solo exhibition, at the Boussod et Valadon gallery in Paris.
Paints Julie with a greyhound, one of a long sequence of portraits of her daughter.
The French state buys a Morisot painting, Young Woman in a Ball Gown, for the Musée du Luxembourg.
Catches influenza from Julie, which turns into pneumonia.
Dies in Paris on 2 March, aged fifty-four. Her death certificate records her profession as none.
Is buried in the Passy cemetery in the Manet family grave. Stéphane Mallarmé becomes Julie's guardian.
Degas, Monet, Renoir and Mallarmé organise a memorial exhibition of about three hundred of her works at Durand-Ruel.
A major retrospective travels in the United States and begins the modern reassessment of her work.
A retrospective travels from Quebec to Philadelphia, Dallas and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Painting
A young woman in black looks out of a small canvas, a tall black hat on her head and a posy of violets pinned low on her chest. The woman is Berthe Morisot, a painter who would help found Impressionism two years later and who married the artist's brother Eugène Manet in 1874. The Musée d'Orsay calls the picture a composition in blacks and notes that Édouard Manet gave her black eyes, though hers were green.
Painting
A bearded man in a straw hat sits at the left of a window and looks out through it. Berthe Morisot painted her husband Eugène Manet in the sitting room of the Globe Cottage Hotel at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1875, during their honeymoon, and it is the first picture she made of him. The Musée Marmottan Monet has held it since 1993.
Painting
Two women sit in a rowing boat on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, one in blue, one in gray and white, with three ducks on the water behind them. Berthe Morisot painted it around 1879 and almost certainly showed it at the fifth Impressionist exhibition in April 1880 under a different title, The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne. It belongs to the National Gallery in London as part of the Hugh Lane Bequest, and has spent long periods on loan in Dublin.
Painting
A woman in dark blue leans on one hand and watches a baby asleep behind a veil of white muslin. Berthe Morisot painted her sister Edma Pontillon and Edma's daughter Blanche in Paris in 1872, and showed the canvas as number 104 at the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874. Nobody bought it. The French state acquired it in 1930, and it has been at the Musée d'Orsay since 1986.
Painting
Berthe Morisot painted the outer harbor at Lorient in the summer of 1869, while staying with her newly married sister Edma. Edma sits on the stone parapet at the right with a pink parasol tilted behind her shoulder, small against a wide stretch of water and moored shipping. Morisot gave the canvas to Édouard Manet that year. It is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which shows it in Gallery 82.
Painting
A woman sits with her back to the viewer at a dressing table, in a pale off-the-shoulder dress and a black velvet ribbon, one arm raised toward her hair. Berthe Morisot painted her between 1875 and 1880 in strokes so thin and open that the mirror on the left gives back almost nothing. The Art Institute of Chicago has had the canvas since 1924; Mary Cassatt owned it in 1896.
Met
The Met records the friendship plainly: Manet befriended Morisot, and she eventually married his younger brother Eugène. The Orsay catalogues her as 'Berthe Morisot (Madame Eugène Manet).'
Met
Fellow exhibitors of the independent shows and close family friends: Renoir painted Morisot with her daughter Julie in 1894, and after Morisot's death in 1895 he took the orphaned Julie in for the summer and kept a continuing interest in her welfare.
Corot taught Morisot in the late 1850s and early 1860s, which puts him behind two of the painters who would show at the first Impressionist exhibition.
Art movement · 1874–1886
Showed in seven of the eight independent exhibitions — only Pissarro appeared more often.
Morisot is buried in the Manet family tomb at Passy Cemetery with her husband Eugene Manet and her brother-in-law Edouard Manet.
Visit the place
Morisot trained by copying paintings at the Louvre. It was there that she and her sister Edma met Edouard Manet in 1868.
Visit the place
Morisot exhibited in the second Impressionist exhibition, held at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery on the rue Le Peletier in 1876.
Visit the place
Morisot's first solo exhibition was held at the Boussod, Valadon gallery on the boulevard Montmartre in 1892, when she was fifty-one.
Visit the place
Morisot took part in the first Impressionist exhibition, held in April 1874 in the photographer Nadar's former studio. She was the only woman among the founding exhibitors.
Visit the place
Morisot moved to 10 rue Weber after Eugene Manet's death in 1892 and completed more than a hundred works there before her own death in 1895.
Visit the place
One of the Morisot family's homes on what was then the rue Franklin, in Passy, during the years when Berthe and Edma Morisot were training as painters.
Visit the place
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.
Visit the place
Morisot and Eugene Manet had this house built on what was then the rue de Villejust in the early 1880s. She lived and worked here and hosted gatherings attended by Renoir, Degas, Monet and Mallarme.
Visit the place
Morisot made her official Salon debut in 1864, exhibiting at the annual Salon held in the Palais de l'Industrie, a decade before she joined the independent exhibitions.
Visit the placeA French painter, born at Bourges in 1841 and died in Paris in 1895. She was one of the founders of Impressionism, the only woman among the group that mounted the first exhibition in 1874, and she showed in every one of the eight group exhibitions except 1879. She painted about four hundred works.
The world a woman of her class was allowed to be in: drawing rooms, gardens, nurseries, women dressing, wet nurses, boats seen from a balcony, and above all her daughter Julie. She could not sit alone in a café or a bar, so the public Paris of the other Impressionists is largely absent from her work.
She met him in 1868 and he painted her about a dozen times, including The Balcony and Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets. In 1874 she married his younger brother Eugène. The influence ran both ways: she persuaded Manet to paint outdoors, and his lighter palette of the 1870s follows her practice.
Her family said so, and the claim is repeated in many older accounts. Genealogists have not been able to confirm any descent from Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and the connection is now generally treated as family legend rather than fact.
Because she chose it. Morisot left canvas bare, let one stroke stand for an arm or a fold of cloth, and stopped before the surface was covered, so her paintings can look like another artist's underpainting. Critics of the 1870s read this as unfinished work; painters read it as the point, and she used the same handling in oil, watercolour and pastel.
Of pneumonia, in Paris on 2 March 1895, aged fifty-four. She had caught influenza while nursing her daughter Julie through it. Her death certificate recorded her occupation as none, after thirty years as a professional exhibiting painter.
The Cradle (1872), at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, is the one most people know: her sister Edma beside a sleeping baby behind a muslin veil. Summer's Day (1879) hangs at the National Gallery in London, and Woman at Her Toilette (about 1875–80) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight (1875), painted on her honeymoon, is at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the museum with the largest Morisot collection anywhere.
A portrait of Morisot by Édouard Manet, not a painting by her: black dress, black hat, a small bunch of violets at the neckline, painted in 1872 and now at the Musée d'Orsay. Of the fourteen portraits Manet made of her between 1868 and 1874, it is the one most often reproduced.
Associated with · 1874–1886
Showed in seven of the eight independent exhibitions — only Pissarro appeared more often.
Met
The Met records the friendship plainly: Manet befriended Morisot, and she eventually married his younger brother Eugène. The Orsay catalogues her as 'Berthe Morisot (Madame Eugène Manet).'
Buried at · 1895
Morisot is buried in the Manet family tomb at Passy Cemetery with her husband Eugene Manet and her brother-in-law Edouard Manet.
Exhibited at · 1876
Morisot exhibited in the second Impressionist exhibition, held at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery on the rue Le Peletier in 1876.
Exhibited at · 1892
Morisot's first solo exhibition was held at the Boussod, Valadon gallery on the boulevard Montmartre in 1892, when she was fifty-one.
Exhibited at · 1874
Morisot took part in the first Impressionist exhibition, held in April 1874 in the photographer Nadar's former studio. She was the only woman among the founding exhibitors.
Exhibited at · 1864
Morisot made her official Salon debut in 1864, exhibiting at the annual Salon held in the Palais de l'Industrie, a decade before she joined the independent exhibitions.
Lived at · 1892–1895
Morisot moved to 10 rue Weber after Eugene Manet's death in 1892 and completed more than a hundred works there before her own death in 1895.
Lived at
One of the Morisot family's homes on what was then the rue Franklin, in Passy, during the years when Berthe and Edma Morisot were training as painters.
Lived at
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.
Lived at
Morisot and Eugene Manet had this house built on what was then the rue de Villejust in the early 1880s. She lived and worked here and hosted gatherings attended by Renoir, Degas, Monet and Mallarme.
Studied at
Morisot trained by copying paintings at the Louvre. It was there that she and her sister Edma met Edouard Manet in 1868.
Met
Fellow exhibitors of the independent shows and close family friends: Renoir painted Morisot with her daughter Julie in 1894, and after Morisot's death in 1895 he took the orphaned Julie in for the summer and kept a continuing interest in her welfare.
Influenced by
Corot taught Morisot in the late 1850s and early 1860s, which puts him behind two of the painters who would show at the first Impressionist exhibition.
Depicted in · 1872
The Musée d'Orsay titles the painting after its sitter and describes her as a young painter with whom Manet shared a deep friendship, whom he took up again as a model when he resumed work at the end of 1871.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Berthe Morisot and their work.
Reference article used for the family background and the disputed Fragonard descent.
Reference guide entry on her career and on the restrictions she worked under.
Reference entry on her training with Corot, her place in the Impressionist group and her subjects.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Reference article on Manet's 1872 portrait of her.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Reference article cross-checked for the dates, the exhibition record, the marriage and the death certificate.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Berthe Morisot page.
Contemporary reporting or criticism used to document the historical reception and context of Berthe Morisot.
Biographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Berthe Morisot.
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