Although Berthe produced many landscapes, her principal subject was domestic life and portraits of family and friends. Her most enduring paintings are dreamy portraits of women and girls in interior settings.
Background: Berthe was born in Bourges, France, into an affluent bourgeois family. Her father was was a senior government official. Her mother was the great-niece of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, one of the most important painters of the Rococo period. She had 2 sisters and a brother. The family moved to Paris when Berthe was a child.
In 1860, Berthe and Edma became pupils of Camille Corot, an important landscape painter, now elderly. It was through him that they began working outdoors.
Career: Berthe first began exhibiting at the Salon, which favored academic and realistic work. She submitted 2 landscape paintings in 1864 when she was 23. She continued to paint realistically and to exhibit at the Salon for 7 years.
In addition to their relationship as artist and model, Berthe and Édouard were also fellow artists who supported each other's work. For a long time Manet was considered Berthe's mentor, but now it is known that they learned from each other, and she is known for persuading him to try painting outdoors, as she had been taught by Corot.
Manet suggested that she marry his younger brother Eugène so that they could remain close, and that's the way it turned out. Berthe and Eugene married when she was 33.
Eugène Manet was one of the good guys of art history. He was a painter himself, but he was less successful than Berthe, and he devoted much of his effort to supporting her career. Berthe and Eugène had one daughter, Julie.
Through her association with the Manets, Berthe became acquainted with a group of artists, including Monet and Renoir, who were challenging the norms of academic realism, and became one of the pioneers of the movement that became known as Impressionism. It was daring of her to join forces with them, because she already had a reputation as a promising painter in the dominant realistic mode, and also because Manet had advised her against it. She was in every Impressionist show, except the year her daughter was born, 1877.
Berthe focused on domestic life and portraits of family and friends, rendered in a very loose style. Morisot's style is so unassertive that it is difficult to appreciate. She used the Impressionist's small, broken brushstrokes along with a pale, low-contrast palette in such a way that the lovely young women she depicted tended to de-materialize into the setting, like part of the decoration. Later, she developed a longer, smoother brushstroke that defined forms more firmly.
The family finances were sufficiently healthy for her not to depend on the art market for support, and, at the time of her death, most of her work remained in her studio. In 1993 Julie's son donated a large group of Berthe's works to the Musée Marmottan Monet, and another a few years later, another grandson added a few more works, and some of Berthe's furnishings. The museum now holds 81 works by Morisot.
Our photos of Berthe's work:
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| The Artist’s Sister at a Window, 1869 National Gallery / Jan's photo, 2014 |
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| The Sisters, 1869 National Gallery Photo by Dan L. Smith, 2006 |
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| The Mother and Sister of the Artist, 1870 National Gallery / Jan's photo, 2010 |
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| The Cradle, 1872 Photo by Dan L. Smith Musée D'Orsay, 2015 |
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| View of Paris from the Trocadero, c. 1875 Santa Barbara Jan's Photo, 2017 |
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| Young Woman Powdering Herself, 1877 Orsay / Jan's photo, 2015 |
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| Young Girl in Ball Gown, 1879 Orsay / Jan's photo, 2015 |
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| Young Woman Seated on a Sofa, c. 1879 Metropolitan / Jan's photo, 2015 |
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| Woman at her Toilette, 1880 Chicago / Jan's photo, 2010 |
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| Woman in a Garden, 1883 Chicago / Jan's photo, 2010 |
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| Lucie Léon at the Piano, 1892 Seattle / Jan's photo, 2014 |
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| Young Girl with Basket, 1892 Philadelphia / Jan's photo, 2012 |
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| Two Girls, 1894 Phillips Collection Photo by Dan L. Smith, 2006 |
Internet examples:
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| Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight, 1875 Musée Marmottan Monet / Internet |
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| Hanging the Laundry out to Dry, 1875 National Gallery, D.C. / Internet |
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| Eugene Manet With His Daughter At Bougival, c. 1881 Musée Marmottan Monet / Internet |
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| The Artist's Daughter Julie with her Nanny, c. 1884 Minneapolis / Internet |
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| Reclining Nude Shepardess, 1891 (artist age 50) Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza / Internet |
While the painting style shows the influence of Renoir's nudes of the period, the pose is considered unique, and shows that Berthe was still innovating late in her career.
