Berthe Morisot

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (14 January 1841 – 2 March 1895) was a French painter and printmaker who belonged to the Parisian group later called the Impressionists.

She first exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon in 1864, listed as a student of Joseph Guichard and Achille-Francois Oudinot. Her work appeared in six more Salons after that. In 1874, she left the Salon to join the so-called "rejected" Impressionists for their first independent exhibition, held at the photographer Nadar’s studio. That show included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Morisot took part in all but one of the eight Impressionist exhibitions staged between 1874 and 1886.

She married Eugène Manet, brother of her friend and fellow artist Édouard Manet. In 1894, critic Gustave Geffroy named her one of *Les trois grandes dames*—the three great ladies—of Impressionism, alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.

Morisot was born in Bourges, France, into a wealthy bourgeois family. Her father, Edmé Tiburce Morisot, served as prefect of the Cher department and had studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts. Her mother, Marie-Joséphine-Cornélie Thomas, was the great-niece of the Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Berthe had two older sisters, Yves (1838–1893) and Edma (1839–1921), and a younger brother, Tiburce, born in 1848. The family moved to Paris in 1852.

Daughters of bourgeois families commonly received art lessons, so Berthe and her sisters studied privately with Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne and Joseph Guichard. They began lessons so each could make a birthday drawing for their father. In 1857, Guichard—who ran a girls’ school on Rue des Moulins—took Berthe and Edma to the Louvre, where from 1858 they learned by copying paintings. The Morisot sisters were not allowed to work at the museum without a chaperone and were completely barred from formal training. Guichard also introduced them to the works of Gavarni.

Berthe and Edma worked closely together as art students until 1869, when Edma married naval officer Adolphe Pontillon, moved to Cherbourg, and had less time to paint. Their letters reveal a loving bond, with Berthe regretting the distance and Edma’s withdrawal from painting. Edma fully supported Berthe’s continued work, and their families stayed close. Edma wrote: “I am often with you in thought, dear Berthe. I'm in your studio and I like to slip away, if only for a quarter of an hour, to breathe that atmosphere that we shared for many years.” Yves married tax inspector Théodore Gobillard in 1866 and was painted by Edgar Degas as *Madame Théodore Gobillard*.

While copying at the Louvre, Morisot met and befriended artists including Manet and Monet. In 1861 she was introduced to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a leading Barbizon landscape painter who also worked in figure painting. Under his influence, she adopted plein air methods. By 1863 she studied under another Barbizon painter, Achille Oudinot. During the winter of 1863–64 she studied sculpture under Aimé Millet, but none of her sculptures survive.

**Training, 1857–1870**: Tracing Morisot’s training is difficult because she was never satisfied with her work and destroyed nearly everything she made before 1869. She began art lessons in 1857 with Chocarne, who taught her drawing basics. After a few months, she found his teaching dull and requested a new teacher, then studied with Guichard, drawing mostly ancient classical figures. When she expressed interest in plein air painting, Guichard sent her to follow Corot and Oudinot. Outdoors she used watercolours, which were easy to carry, and also became interested in pastel.

**Watercolour, 1870–1874**: Still finding oil painting difficult, Morisot worked mainly in watercolours. Her colour palette was restrained, but the delicate repetition of hues created a balanced effect. Watercolours allowed her to produce a translucent atmosphere and feathery touch that gave her paintings freshness.

**Impressionism, 1875–1885**: More confident with oil, Morisot worked in oil, watercolours, and pastel simultaneously, like Degas. She painted quickly but did extensive preparatory sketching, aiming to paint “a mouth, eyes, and a nose with a single brushstroke.” She made countless studies of subjects drawn from her own life, becoming very familiar with them. When outdoor painting was inconvenient, the highly finished watercolours from preparation allowed her to continue indoors. In 1874, her Salon submission was rejected—the last time she submitted to that exhibition. That same year she showed ten works at the First Impressionist Exhibition, notably the only woman to exhibit. She exhibited with the Impressionists from 1874 onward, missing only the 1879 show because her daughter Julie was born. Impressionism’s emphasis on brilliant colour and sensual surface effects shaped her work.