When the second Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris in the spring of 1876, one sharp-tongued critic described its participants as “five or six lunatics, one of which is a woman.” 1
I’m not sure how I came across her, (no doubt I was looking for something else) but Impressionist pioneer Berthe Morison . . .
was born in 1841, in Bourges, France, to an affluent family. The family moved to Paris in 1852. Morisot and her close-knit sisters began private art lessons. It is difficult to trace the stages of Morisot’s training, to tell the exact influence of her teachers, because she was never pleased with her work and destroyed nearly all of the artworks she produced before 1869.2
Yikes, talk about an over achiever. Poor thing.
As a copyist3 at the Louvre, Morisot met and befriended other artists such as Manet and Monet. By 1872 Morisot had an art dealer. Unusual for the time, Morisot always exhibited under her maiden name instead of using a pseudonym or her married name. Her work remained popular throughout her lifetime and she often outsold many of her contemporaries, including Degas.
Morisot wrote in a notebook about her struggles to be taken seriously as an artist: “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that’s all I would have asked for, for I know I’m worth as much as they.” She was highly unusual in her decision to be an artist as well as a wife and mother. Throughout her career, Berthe Morisot had to fight against preconceptions of women and their role.
Morisot creates a sense of space and depth through the use of color. Her fellow impressionists regarded her as a “virtuoso colorist.4 Morisot’s works are almost always small in scale.
By ‘middle age’ Morisot had started to use the technique of squaring, using tracing paper5 to transcribe her drawing to the canvas exactly. By employing this new method, Morisot was able to create compositions with more complicated interaction between figures. She stressed the composition and the forms while her Impressionist brushstrokes still remained.
Morisot died in 1895, in Paris, of pneumonia contracted while tending to her daughter sick daughter, Julie. The year after Berthe’s death, her artist friends, including Degas, Renoir, and Monet organized the first retrospective of Morisot’s work, drawing together 380 of her paintings and paying tribute to her talent.6
1Mathieu, Marianne, Musée Marmottan Berthe Morisot: 1841-1895. Hazan Editions. Paris. 2012.
2Harmon, Melissa Burdick. Monet, Renoir, Degas … Morisot the Forgotten Genius of Impressionism. Biography, vol. 5, no. 6, June 2001. 98.
3The Louvre in Paris was one of the first museums to enable artists to copy art in 1793. Other major museums followed such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1872. To become a copyist in 1880 at the Louvre, all an artist needed was a permit. After gaining permission, a complimentary easel was provided to the artist for a year. Picasso began practicing art as a copyist. It is more difficult to get a permit now.
4Stuckey, Charles F.; Scott, William P. (1987). Berthe Morisot: Impressionist. New York: Hudson Hills Press. 187-207.
5 Made from Cellulose fibers, which can be obtained from the bark, wood or leaves of plants, or any other plant-based material.
