Julie Manet

Julie Manet was painted by her mother throughout her childhood, orphaned at sixteen, and kept a diary that is one of the best sources for the Impressionist circle from inside. She was Berthe Morisot's only child and the niece of Edouard Manet, and she appears in dozens of her mother's canvases - reading, with a cat, with her father, growing up in paint. Her father Eugene died in 1892 and Morisot in 1895, and Julie was left in the guardianship of Stephane Mallarme with Renoir and Degas closely involved; she went to live with her cousins Jeannie and Paule Gobillard, and the three young women kept a household that the older painters visited constantly. The diary she kept from 1893 to 1899 records Renoir talking about how he worked, Degas being unbearable, the Dreyfus affair splitting the circle - she and her guardians were on the wrong side of it - and the ordinary business of grief. It was published in 1979 and is now a standard source. She painted herself, exhibited, and married Ernest Rouart, a pupil of Degas. She spent the rest of her long life organising her mother's catalogue, lending to exhibitions and giving works to French museums, which is most of why Morisot survived at all. She sat for Renoir, who painted her with a cat in 1887, and for Manet as a small child on a watering can. Mallarme wrote to her in verse and was, by her account, the gentlest of the guardians. She and Ernest Rouart married in a double wedding with her cousin Jeannie and the poet Paul Valery in 1900. The Rouart and Valery families between them held the Morisot estate for most of the twentieth century, and the 2019 retrospectives drew heavily on what Julie had preserved and catalogued. She died at eighty-eight.

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