Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)
Berthe Morisot was a French painter and printmaker and the first woman to join the circle of the French impressionist painters. She exhibited in all but one of their shows, and, despite the protests of friends and family, continued to participate in their struggle for recognition.
Berthe,the daughter of a successful and wealthy government official who himself was an enthusiastic amateur painter and supporter of the arts, was born in 1841 in Bourges, Cher, France. Being part of a family of wealth and culture, she received the conventional lessons in drawing and painting and eventually decided to make a career of these pursuits.
By age 20, she befriended the important landscape painter of the Barbizon school, Camille Corot and he started tutoring Berthe and her sister Edma as well as introducing them to other artists and teachers. She worked under his guidance from 1862 to 1868 and her first acceptance in the Salon de Paris came in 1864 with two delicate landscape paintings. She continued to show regularly in the Salon until 1874, the year of the first impressionist exhibition, when she vowed never to show her paintings in the officially sanctioned forum again.
© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
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Without exception, her subject matter shows the equivalent of that of her impressionist colleagues. Edgar Degas, the dandy male bourgeois, painted rehearsals of the ballet, horse races, and nude women in apartments (rather than studios). Claude Monet painted his garden, his children, and his neighbour's haystacks. Female impressionists painted their social milieu in a way consistent with the impressionist approach to subject matter.
Morisot and American artist Mary Cassatt are generally considered the most important women painters of the later 19th century.
Berthe Morisot died on March 2, 1895 in Paris and was interred in the Cimetière de Passy.
After her death a large memorial exhibition of 300 pictures took place at Durand-Ruel’s; the catalogue introduction being written by her close friend, Mallarmé. With her fresh, bright impressions of happy domestic life, she made an important contribution to Impressionism.
Today, the paintings of Berthe Morisot can sell for more than $4 million.
The record of paintings shows Manet's approval and appreciation of certain stylistic and compositional decisions that Morisot made, and he incorporated them into his own work, while Morisot continued to develop her own unique slant rather than imitating Manet. It was Morisot who convinced Manet to attempt plein air painting, and drew him into the circle of acquaintance of the painters who became known as the impressionists. However, he never considered himself an impressionist or agreed to show with the group.
In 1881-1883, Morisot and her husband Eugene, had a house built in Paris. Being a woman of great culture and charm, her house became a weekly meeting place for painters and writers such as Degas, Caillebotte, Monet, Pissaro, Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Duret, Renoir, Mallarmé and others. Mallarmé, especially, became her closest friend and greatest admirer. In 1892, she was widowed and bought a château in Mesnil.
Morisot's paintings formed an important addition to all of the impressionist exhibitions, except for one which she missed due to ill health. Like that of the other Impressionists, her work was ridiculed by many critics. Although she was never commercially successful during her lifetime, she nevertheless outsold Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.
Like Mary Cassatt, during her lifetime, Berthe Morisot was relegated to the category of "feminine" artists because her carefully composed, brightly hued canvasses were often studies of women and children, either out-of-doors or in domestic settings.
She also experimented with seascapes, but, being the leading female exponent of Impressionism, Morisot painted mainly what she saw in her immediate, everyday life. As a woman securely in the "haute bourgeoisie" that constituted domestic interiors, holiday spots, other women, and children.
Under Corot's influence, Morisot took up plein air methods of working. In 1868 she met Edouard Manet, who fell in love with her. As he was already married, however, he had to bear with becoming her brother-in-law when she married his brother Eugene, a union which proved to be quite unsatisfactory. Monet was to exert a tremendous influence over her work and he did several portraits of her (e.g., “Repose,” c. 1870). In 1874, Manet became, and continued to be the most important single influence on the development of her style. Manet had a liberating effect on her work, and she in turn aroused his interest in outdoor painting. He took special interest in Morisot's career and he adored her, as is evident by his warm portrayal of her in several of his paintings, including the most striking, a head study in a black veil, because Morisot was in mourning for her father's death.
Unlike most of the other impressionists, who were then intensely engaged in optical experiments with color, Morisot and Manet agreed on a more conservative approach, confining their use of colour to a naturalistic framework. Morisot, however, did encourage Manet to adopt the impressionists' high-keyed palette and to abandon the use of black. Though many see Manet as the leader and Morisot as the follower, the truth is that they strongly influenced one another.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/morisot
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthe_Morisot
artchive.com/artchive/M/morisot.html
www.abcgallery.com/M/morisot/morisot.html
cgfa.sunsite.dk/morisot/index.html
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