Morisot & Mary

Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt are masters
of 19th century female Impressionism.
Did you know that they were advocates for women’s equality?

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was born into an affluent family in Bourges, France, approximately 150 miles south of Paris. As a teenager, she traveled to Paris with her sister to study the Old Masters at the Louvre. She met artist Édouard Manet, marrying his brother six years later. Because the Manet’s were upper class, Berthe could pursue her painting career. However, due to Parisian rules of etiquette she couldn’t venture alone to the bars, cafés, and theaters where male colleagues found their subjects. Because she was a female, Morisot’s paintings were often labeled by male critics as full of “feminine charm.”

Uggg.

When Morisot was approaching 50, she wrote 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 never commercially successful during her lifetime. Morisot did, however, outsell several of her fellow Impressionists, including Monet, Renoir, and Sisley.

Born only three years later, American Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was an outspoken advocate for women’s equality, for instance, campaigning for the right to vote in the 1910s. As a successful, well-trained artist who never married, she depicted the “New Woman” of the 19th century.

Cassatt and her contemporaries enjoyed the wave of feminism that occurred in the 1840s, allowing them access to educational institutions at newly coed colleges and universities. Cassatt began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine in Philadelphia. Due to condescending attitudes of the male students and teachers, however, she decided to study the old masters on her own. Although Cassatt did not explicitly make political statements about women’s rights in her work, her artistic portrayal of women was consistently done with dignity and the suggestion of a deeper, meaningful inner life.

Can you imagine what their worlds could have been if they had been born a century later?

McKown, Robin. The World of Mary Cassatt. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.  1972.
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Berthe Morison Woman Impressionist Emerges From the Margins.” The New Yorker. Oct 29, 2018.