Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions - more than Monet, more than Renoir - and was written out of the movement she helped found for most of a century. She and her sister Edma were taught privately because the Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not admit women, copied in the Louvre, and were mentored by Corot. Edma gave up painting on marriage; Berthe did not. She met Manet in 1868, modelled for him repeatedly, argued with him about his habit of retouching her canvases, and married his brother Eugene. Her subjects are what a bourgeois woman could actually go and look at - women dressing, children, gardens, the nursery, the balcony - which critics used to call her work minor and which is now read as the accurate record of a life lived under restriction. The handling is the radical part: very loose, thin paint, canvas left bare, edges unresolved, done fast and left. She was central to organising the group exhibitions and held a salon that Mallarme, Degas and Renoir attended. She died at fifty-four of pneumonia caught nursing her daughter; her death certificate recorded no profession. Her daughter Julie Manet kept a diary of the household that is a principal source for the Impressionist circle, and was left in the care of Mallarme and Renoir when Morisot died. A memorial exhibition of nearly four hundred works was held in 1896 and then her reputation faded for eighty years. Major retrospectives in 2018 and 2019 restored her to the centre of the movement.

• Lived: 1841 CE – 1895 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: artist