Berthe Morisot

Trained seriously, exhibited early

Morisot was born in Bourges in 1841 into a prosperous bourgeois family that moved to Passy, in western Paris, in her childhood. Unusually, her mother treated her daughters' art lessons as more than an accomplishment: Berthe copied old masters at the Louvre and studied plein-air painting under Camille Corot. In 1864, at twenty-three, she had work accepted at the Paris Salon, and she showed there regularly through the rest of the decade.

In 1868 she met Édouard Manet, and the acquaintance reshaped both careers. He painted her fourteen times over the following years — the portrait with a bouquet of violets at the Musée d'Orsay is the best known — and she was never his student. The influence ran in both directions.

Seven of the eight exhibitions

When the independents organized their first exhibition in April 1874, Morisot was invited and accepted, setting aside the Salon that had already taken her work. She hung The Cradle — a mother watching her sleeping child through a veil of muslin — in the rooms on the boulevard des Capucines where Louis Leroy coined 'Impressionist' as an insult.

She then showed in every exhibition the group held except the fourth, in 1879, months after her daughter's birth — the reason usually suggested for her one absence. Only Camille Pissarro, present at all eight, appeared more often. She was one of the artists who constituted Impressionism, exhibition by exhibition, from the first room to the last.

The Manet household and Passy

On 22 December 1874, the year of the first exhibition, Morisot married Eugène Manet, Édouard's younger brother. Their daughter Julie was born on 14 November 1878, and the family later built a house at 40 rue de Villejust, near the Bois de Boulogne.

Her subjects were the modern life she had access to paint: interiors, gardens, women reading or at the toilette, Julie at every age. Critics praised the work in gendered terms — spontaneity, delicacy, a 'feminine' eye — and that language followed her reputation for a century. The paintings themselves are fast and decisive, and late canvases like Le Cerisier, now at the Marmottan, are looser still.

Death, and the family's long answer

In the winter of 1895 Julie caught influenza, and Morisot, nursing her, developed pneumonia. She died in Paris on 2 March 1895, at fifty-four, and was buried beside Eugène and Édouard Manet. Julie, sixteen, was left in the care of the circle her mother had gathered; her diary of those years became one of the movement's essential documents.

Poor Madame Morisot, the public hardly knows her!

The public knows her now largely because her family kept the work together. In 1993 the descendants of Julie Manet — the Rouart family — bequeathed twenty-five oil paintings and some seventy-five watercolours, with pastels and drawings, to the Musée Marmottan Monet, which calls it the world's leading collection of her work. The Cradle hangs at the Musée d'Orsay; most of the rest is in the house by the Ranelagh gardens.