French painter Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot belonged to the group of artists in Paris known as the Impressionists.

Morisot debuted as an exhibitor in the prestigious Salon de Paris in 1864. The Salon was the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris's official annual exhibition, sponsored by the government and judged by Academicians. She joined the "rejected" Impressionists in the first of their exhibits in 1874, with Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Her work was chosen for exhibition in six other Salons. It took place in Nadar's photography studio. Between 1874 and 1886, Morisot participated in all but one of the subsequent eight impressionist exhibitions.

The brother of Morisot's friend and coworker Édouard Manet was Eugène Manet.

Along with Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond, she was named one of "les trois grandes dames" (The three great ladies) of Impressionism by art critic Gustave Geffroy in 1894.

Early Years

Morisot was born on January 14, 1841, into a wealthy bourgeois family in Bourges, France. Edmé Tiburce Morisot, her father, served as the Cher department's prefect (top administrator). The École des Beaux-Arts was where he also studied architecture. One of the most productive Rococo artists of the old regime, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, had a great-niece named Marie-Joséphine-Cornélie Thomas, who was her mother. She had a younger brother named Tiburce, born in 1848, along with two elder sisters named Yves (1838-1893) and Edma (1839-1921). When Morisot was a young child (1852), the family relocated to Paris.

Berthe, along with her sisters Yves and Edma, was taught privately by Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne and Joseph Guichard because it was customary for daughters of bourgeois households to have an education in the arts. In the beginning, Morisot and her sisters enrolled in courses so they could each create a drawing for their father's birthday. Berthe and Edma were first introduced to the Louvre gallery in 1857 by Guichard, who managed a school for girls in Rue des Moulins. Starting in 1858, they studied by imitating paintings there. The Morisots were wholly prohibited from formal training and were disallowed to work at the museum alone. They were also introduced to Gavarni's works by Guichard.

Until Edma married Adolphe Pontillon, a naval officer, relocated to Cherbourg, and had less time to paint, Berthe and Edma frequently collaborated as art students. The sisters' letters reveal a close bond, highlighted by Berthe's grief at their separation and Edma's decision to stop painting. Berthe's continuous career was supported entirely by Edma, and their families were always close. Edma penned, "My beloved Berthe, I constantly think about you. When I'm in your studio, I prefer to sneak away for a short while to take in the atmosphere we shared for a long time ".

Edgar Degas painted her sister Yves as Mrs. Theodore Gobillard after she wed tax inspector Theodore Gobillard in 1866. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City).

Morisot made friends with Manet and Monet while working as a copyist at the Louvre. She met Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a key player in Barbizon school landscape painting and a master of figure painting, in 1861. She started working en Plein air (outdoors) due to Corot's influence. She began taking classes with fellow Barbizon painter Achille Oudinot in 1863. She studied sculpting with Aimé Millet during the winter of 1863–1864, but no examples of her work are known to have survived.

Training, 1857–1870

Because Morisot was never satisfied with her work and destroyed almost all of her early works, it is difficult to determine the stages of her instruction and the precise effect of her tutors. Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne, her first instructor, taught her the fundamentals of drawing. After a while, Morisot started attending Guichard's classes. She primarily sketched ancient classical figures around this time. Guichard sent Morisot to follow Corot and Oudinot after learning of her passion for painting outdoors. She used portable watercolors for her outdoor painting. Morisot also developed an interest in pastels during that period.

1870–1874: Watercolorist

During this time, Morisot primarily worked in watercolor because he still had trouble with oil painting. Although she uses a limited palette, the subtle repetition of hues creates a harmonious result. Morisot achieved a transparent atmosphere and a feathery touch thanks to the unique properties of watercolors as a medium, which add to the freshness of her works.

from 1875 to 1885, impressionism

As Degas did, Morisot simultaneously worked in oil, watercolor, and pastel after growing more comfortable with oil painting. She sketched extensively in advance but painted rapidly so she could "create a mouth, eyes, and nose with a single brushstroke." She conducted a great deal of research on her life's experiences, which allowed her to become quite knowledgeable about her subjects. The highly completed watercolors in the preliminary phases permitted her to continue painting indoors when it became inconvenient to paint outside.

1885–1887, turning

The drawing took the stage in Morisot's artwork after 1885. Morisot used charcoals and colored pencils to experiment actively. Her Impressionist acquaintances, known for blending shapes, inspired her to pick up drawing again. During this time, Morisot concentrated on making the form and lines clear. Japonism and photography also influenced her. She adapted the technique of positioning things away from the composition's center from contemporary Japanese prints.

1887–1995 Synthesis

Morisot began to square her drawing and utilize tracing paper as the medium to transfer it to the canvas accurately. Morisot produced compositions with more intricate figure-to-figure interactions by using this new technique. She used her impressionist brushstrokes to emphasize the forms and the design. Her latest paintings were notable for their innovative fusion of the Impressionist style with broad strokes and light reflections and the visual approach with sharp lines.

Technique

Male critics sometimes referred to Morisot's paintings as having "feminine charm" because of their beauty and lightness because she was a female artist. "I don't think there has ever been a male who treated a woman as an equal, and that's all I would have asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they," wrote Morisot in a diary about her attempts to be taken seriously as an artist in 1890. The word "effleurage," which means to touch lightly or brush against, was frequently used by critics to describe her technique because of her sparse brushstrokes. As other Impressionists did in their early years, Morisot painted outdoors to seek out truths in observation. Her brushwork loosened up when she started painting on unprimed canvases, a medium that Manet and Eva Gonzalès also experimented with at the period. Her brushstrokes changed in 1888–1889 from short, quick ones to lengthy, sinuous ones that define form. Her paintings frequently had unpainted exterior edges, which enhanced the illusion of spontaneity by letting the canvas peek through. She began her oil paintings with preliminary sketches after 1885 and primarily worked from those. Additionally, she sketched using various sketching mediums while working in oil paint, watercolor, and pastel. The scale of Morisot's works is nearly never large.

Morisot uses color to provide a sense of depth and space. Her fellow impressionists regarded her as a "virtuoso colorist" despite having a somewhat limited color palette. Whether using it alone or in combination with other colors, she frequently employed a lot of white to convey a sense of transparency. Colors are more intense yet still employed to emphasize form in her huge painting, The Cherry Tree.

She created a theme using minimal color, drawing inspiration from Manet's works. To synchronize the paintings, Morisot utilized faintly colored whites in response to the attempts made by Manet and Edgar Degas. Like Degas, she experimented with three different mediums in one painting: oil, pastel, and watercolor. In the second portion of her career, she imitated Renoir's motifs to absorb his lessons. In her later works, she also shared Renoir's focus on maintaining harmony between figures' density and light's ambient qualities.

Morisot depicted her daily life in her paintings. Her paintings typically feature domestic settings with family members, young children, women, and flowers to illustrate what life was like for women in the late nineteenth century. Morisot preferred creating intimate, private settings over depicting the world as it was in the public sphere and society. The cultural limitations of her class and gender at the time are somewhat reflected. She concentrated on painting home scenes and portraiture, using her daughter Julie and sister Edma as models, like fellow Impressionist Mary Cassatt. The stenographic portrayal of her day-to-day activities expresses a deep desire to halt the speeding up of time. She used metaphors to praise womanhood by depicting flowers. Before painting scenes of modern femininity, Morisot painted subjects in keeping with the Barbizon school. She described current nursery furniture trends in paintings like The Cradle (1872), demonstrating her awareness of fashion and advertising, which would have been evident to her female audience. Her artwork also features scenes from boats, gardens, and landscapes with an ennui or boredom theme. Morisot used more ambitious pieces, such as nudity, later in her career. In her later works, she frequently returned to the past to recollect memories of her previous life, her youth, and her late friends.

Impressionism

At 23, Morisot entered the Salon de Paris for the first time in 1864 when two of his landscape paintings were accepted. She continued to exhibit frequently in the Salon until 1873, the year before the debut of the Impressionist movement, to generally positive reviews. Except in 1878, when her daughter was born, she exhibited with the Impressionists starting in 1874.

Many critics claimed that Impressionism was inherently feminine and best suited to women's weaker temperaments, inferior intellectual abilities, and greater sensibility because of its alleged attachment to brilliant color, sensual surface effects, and fleeting sensory perceptions. This style was once primarily the arena of insouciant, combative males.

The Le Figaro critic Albert Wolff wrote about the Impressionists during Morisot's 1874 exhibition alongside other Impressionists like Monet and Manet, saying they were made up of "five or six lunatics, one of whom is a woman whose feminine grace is maintained amid the outpourings of a delirious mind."

The adult career of Morisot started in 1872. With the private dealer Durand-Ruel, who purchased 22 paintings, she discovered a market for her art. She was referred to as the "one authentic Impressionist in this group" by the critic for Le Temps in 1877. Instead of using an alias or her married name, she opted to exhibit under her maiden name. Several people started to change their minds about Morisot as her skill and style developed. Many reviewers of the 1880 exhibition placed Morisot among the best, even Le Figaro critic Albert Wolff.

Personal Life

Morisot was from a distinguished family; she was the great-niece of Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard and the daughter of a government official. In 1868, she first met Édouard Manet, who became a lifelong friend and workmate. In 1874, Morisot wed Eugène Manet, Édouard's brother, thanks to the appearance of Manet. She gave birth to Julie, her only child, on November 14, 1878. Julie frequently posed for her mother and other Impressionist painters, including Renoir and her uncle Édouard.

Morisot and Édouard Manet's correspondence reveals their friendship, and Manet gifted Morisot an easel for Christmas. Morisot frequently sat for Manet, and he painted several portraits of her, including Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet in Repose (Portrait of Berthe Morisot). To care for her daughter Julie's same illness, Morisot developed pneumonia on March 2, 1895, in Paris, leaving Julie, then 16 years old, an orphan. She was buried in the Passy Cemetery.

Most paintings Berthe Morisot did are about People, Sketch and Study, Portrait, Landscape, Garden, Seascape, Cityscape, and other subjects.

Most of the artist's works that can be seen by the public today are now kept in museums like Musée Marmottan Monet, National Gallery of Art - Washington DC, Musée d'Orsay, and others.

Famous Berthe Morisot period artists include Pierre Auguste Renoir (French, 1841 -1919), Eugène-Louis Boudin (French, 1824 -1898), Claude Monet (French, 1840 -1926), Camille Pissarro (French, 1830 -1903), Marianne North (British, 1830 -1890), Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853 -1890), Edgar Degas (French, 1834 -1917), Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky (Russian, 1817 -1900), Alfred Sisley (French, 1839 -1899), William Merritt Chase (American, 1849 -1916), Paul Cézanne (French, 1839 -1906), Odilon Redon (French, 1840 -1916), and others.

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