Ernest Rouart

Ernest Rouart was the only pupil Degas ever took, married Berthe Morisot's daughter, and spent his life at the centre of Impressionism as a collector rather than as a painter of any great note. He was the youngest son of Henri Rouart, an engineer and industrialist who had been at school with Degas, fought beside him in the siege of Paris, exhibited in the Impressionist shows himself and assembled one of the finest private collections in France. Degas agreed to teach Ernest and set him to copy Mantegna and Delacroix in the Louvre for several years, which was the whole of the instruction and which Ernest recorded in notes that are now a principal source for how Degas thought about drawing. In 1900 he married Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot and Eugene Manet and therefore the niece of Edouard Manet; Degas had encouraged the match. Julie's diary of her adolescence, kept after her mother's death when Renoir, Degas and Mallarme were her guardians in fact if not in law, is one of the best eyewitness accounts of the Impressionist circle, and Ernest appears through it. Together they worked for decades to get Morisot recognised, organising exhibitions and cataloguing her work at a time when she was treated as a footnote to the men. The dispersal of his father's collection at auction in 1912 was one of the largest art sales of the period. He exhibited at the Salon and painted decorative panels, and his own work is held in a few French museums without ever having had a following. He and Julie had three sons. Their house on the rue de Villejust held Morisot's studio and much of the family collection, and it is where a great deal of what is now in the Musee Marmottan and the Musee d'Orsay spent the first half of the twentieth century.

• Lived: 1874 CE – 1942 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: artist