Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) was a central figure in the Impressionist movement, rather than a peripheral participant in its history. Born in Bourges and raised in a prosperous family, she received private artistic instruction and developed an early interest in painting outdoors. Camille Corot was an important influence. After exhibiting at the official Paris Salon, she joined the first independent Impressionist exhibition in 1874, the year she married Eugène Manet, Édouard Manet’s brother.
Morisot’s subjects include women, children, gardens and domestic interiors, but their familiarity should not obscure the ambition of her painting. She used open brushwork, pale tonal relationships and apparently unfinished passages to register the experience of looking. A face or hand may be sharply indicated while its surroundings dissolve into strokes of colour. This selective definition gives her pictures both immediacy and a particular sensitivity to the people within them.
Her work also reflects the circumstances of a woman pursuing a professional artistic career in nineteenth-century France. The spaces available to her became the material for sustained investigation, not merely a narrow choice of subjects. Interiors opening onto gardens, figures at windows and moments of private activity repeatedly test the boundary between an enclosed world and the life beyond it. Works on paper offer a more intimate view of the same intelligence: an economical mark can carry expression without requiring the whole image to be equally resolved.
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