Wiki
Edma’s skills were especially praised by Corot, but she gave up art to marry a naval officer. She moved from Paris, and the sisters stayed connected via frequent and warm letters. In any case women painters were usually ignored or vilified, so these talented sisters' future as professional artists was always problematic.
The French Academy had always been responsible for art theory, practice, politics and patronage, but not on behalf of artists they disapproved of. So the Impressionists were eventually forced to exhibit their work independently in Salon des Refuses 1863, a showing of avant-garde works rejected by the Salon de Paris. Edouard Manet invited Morisot to exhibit and she did submit 9 works! In a review for Le Figaro, Albert Wolff merely noted 5 or 6 lunatics.
Nonetheless Corot continued to advise her, and his influence was clearly seen in the landscape part of her canvases. In 1864 Berthe submitted 2 of her works to the Salon de Paris, and were positively received by both critics and public. This, the annual exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was impressive.
Berthe and Edouard Manet were copying pictures in the Louvre during 1868; they became close professional colleagues and used each other as models in their own work. Was it a deep friendship or a love affair? Morisot frequently sat for Edouard Manet and he displayed 3 of her works in his bedroom, beginning with The Balcony 1868, a vision in a white dress. Berthe was in Eduard Manet’s home so much that she ended up marrying his brother, Eugene in 1874 at 33. Eugène appeared in her later work, playing with their child, Julie
Most Impressionists used short, broken brush stokes but Berthe used large touches of paint applied freely over the canvas. This gave her work a transparent, iridescent quality eg Artist's mother and sister 1870. Impressionist to be sure, in that their lines ceased to exist in nature.
Hide and Seek, 1873
Edma and her daughter
Like Degas and Cezanne, Morisot often chose pastels. The sketchy nature that was so central to Impressionist art, and the emphasis on creation rather than on the finished work of art, made pastel an ideal medium for Morisot & colleagues. Pastels allowed rapid strokes, easily altered by the fingers, making it even more suitable for Impressionism than water colours. See eg Portrait of Madame Pontillon 1871, a sensitive sisterly pastel.
Most of her images centred on women, children and maids, in domestic settings. After the terrible losses suffered in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), France reasserted its interest in healthy living, domesticity and bourgeois virtues. Her paintings always had a great sense of intimacy eg The Cradle 1873. See her sister Edma who was still busy in marriage and babies. Edma was Berthe's favourite model, and looked Madonna-like as she rocked her baby to sleep.
Most of her images centred on women, children and maids, in domestic settings. After the terrible losses suffered in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), France reasserted its interest in healthy living, domesticity and bourgeois virtues. Her paintings always had a great sense of intimacy eg The Cradle 1873. See her sister Edma who was still busy in marriage and babies. Edma was Berthe's favourite model, and looked Madonna-like as she rocked her baby to sleep.
The Cradle. 1873
Manet's salon evenings in Cafe Guerbois had been so important early in the male Impressionists’ careers, but were clearly not suitable for decent women. Fantin Latour painted a gathering of men at the Manet's studio, A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter, 1870. This group portrait became the first public manifesto of the group, so appropriately it included the artists and their literary friends in Manet's studio. Then Berthe eventually started having meetings in her home every Thurs night. Her artist friends and some writers found her home to be a centre of inspiration & social activity, and she was not excluded.
Fantin Latour A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter, 1870
Bazille had his hands behind his back; Manet was painting; Renoir stood in front of frame; Monet was in back right corner.Smell the fresh summer grass in her work Reading 1873 and feel the cool sun on sister Edma’s back. Strokes of light filled colour danced on the canvas surface. She read a book on the grass and an umbrella lay discarded, showing a fleeting moment of leisure, free of domesticity. Her subject’s blurred face was absorbed in the book.
Reading 1873
It was becoming clear the Salon jurors disliked the Impressionists’ way of painting and would not accept their paintings. So the young artists, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Sisley and Pissarro, decided to rethink their plan. And this time Jean-Baptiste Millet, Jean-François Millet's brother, joined in. Gustave Caillebotte, who started out as a collector, ended up half funding the project. They opened in April 1876 and took over 3 rooms in the Durand-Ruel Gallery, off Boulevard Haussman for 252 works!
In Reclining Woman in Grey 1879, a fashionable Parisian reclined on a settee, though her dress was almost misty. When light hit the strokes, they seemed wettish. Morisot was skilled in embodying her female subjects with real life, unlike Degas’ ballerinas or Manet’s nudes.
Art critic Louis Leroy wrote so rudely of their work that his derisive name for the art form, Impressionism, stuck. In particular he singled out Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas and Morisot with vitriol saying "It is unheard of, appalling! I'll get a stroke from it".
See Morisot’s Summer's Day on a Lake 1879. Presumably Leroy was used to representations in which distant and moving objects were defined with exact detail. Like other Impressionists, Morisot didn’t rely on her memory of ducks to tell her what they should look like. Rather she painted the actual momentary perception.
The Impressionist Exhibition did NOT make money, but Berthe was so stunned by the treatment they received, she remained totally faithful to the group forever. She’d became a close friend of Mary Cassatt, the two women sympathising with each other's struggles. And Pierre Renoir became her closest art friend
Morisot was frail after her daughter was born in 1878, but she returned to the Independent Exhibitions in 1880. Two lovely works evoked both images that she actually saw, AND symbolic works: Summer aka Young Woman by a Window 1878; and Winter aka Woman with a Muff 1880.
Winter, Woman with a Muff, 1880
Dallas
Like other Impressionists, Morisot used touches of colour to indicate form eg Eugene Manet and His Daughter in the Garden 1883. Her paintings gave the impression of quickly recorded, transient moments from life as it was lived (in pleasant bourgeois families).
In the Dining Room 1886 was where Morisot applied bold brushstrokes around, giving the sense of total freedom. And most of her paintings were bathed in a luminous light, like Corot but with more complex colours. Girl on a Divan c1885 was another gentle scene bathed in light.
When Berthe's family went on holidays, she took her paints with her. Thus a few Morisot landscapes appeared eg The Quay at Bougival 1883, Forest of Compiegne 1885 and other marine pictures done at Pontrieux. She became more influenced by Renoir.
In her last years, Morisot’s motion became more introspective. Her first solo show opened in 1892 where the rapid brush strokes that long defined her practice became clearer, and her images focused more. In Julie Dreaming (1894), Morisot’s red-headed teenage daughter stared, her face glowing against coloured streaks. Berthe died in Paris in 1895 from lung disease, at 54, and later that year, Degas arranged a memorial exhibition of Berthe's works.