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Died on 02 March 1895: Berthe
Marie-Pauline Morisot, Mme. Eugène Manet, French
Impressionist
painter born on 14 January 1841.
— Berthe Morisot was a French impressionist painter. Influenced by
the artists Camille Corot and Edouard
Manet, she gave up her early classical training to pursue an individualistic
impressionistic style that became distinctive for its delicacy and subtlety.
Her technique, based on large touches of paint applied freely in every direction,
give her works a transparent, iridescent quality. She worked both in oil
and in watercolor, producing mainly landscapes and scenes of women and children,
as in Madame Pontillon Seated on the Grass (1873).
— Born into a family of wealth and culture, Morisot received the conventional
lessons in drawing and painting. She went firmly against convention, however,
in choosing to take these pursuits seriously and make them her life's work.
Having studied for a time under Camille Corot, she later began her long
friendship with Édouard Manet, who became her brother-in-law in 1874
and was the most important single influence on the development of her style.
Unlike most of the other impressionists, who were then intensely engaged
in optical experiments with color, Morisot and Manet agreed on a more conservative
approach, confining their use of color to a naturalistic framework. Morisot,
however, did encourage Manet to adopt the impressionists' high-keyed palette
and to abandon the use of black. Her own carefully composed, brightly hued
canvases are often studies of women, either out-of-doors or in domestic
settings. Morisot and US artist Mary
Cassatt are generally considered the most important women painters of
the later 19th century.
— Berthe Morisot's mother arranged drawing lessons for her three daughters
with no other intention than cultivating a polite pastime. That Berthe emerged
with professional aspirations must have caused some consternation in their
upper-middle-class Parisian household, since it might have compromised her
future responsibilities as a wife and mother. Between 1864 and 1868 Morisot
exhibited at the Paris Salon. Her early contact with the plein air Barbizon
painter Camille Corot and her meeting Edouard Manet, whose work was reviled
by both critics and Salon officials, encouraged her to repudiate the Salon
system. As a result, she began to follow a more independent path and to
exhibit her work with the Impressionists. She married Eugène Manet, Edouard's
younger brother in 1874, the year the Impressionists held their first controversial
exhibition — her
portrait by brother-in-law Manet
— LINKS
— Au
Bois de Boulogne (1888) — Paris
vu du Trocadéro (1872) — Cache-cache
(1873, 45x55cm) — Nice
Little Girl (Nice: the city)
— La
lecture (1888) _ This is at once a genre scene and a portrait of Jeanne
Bonnet. It conveys Morisot's ability to integrate her art and family life
by painting canvases of domestic scenes. Although out-of-doors, the space
of Reading is shallow, compressed by a balcony railing and foliage.
Morisot employed many compositional devices — the bird cage, the railing
and chair, the wall casement, and the palm frond that arches over the sitter's
head — to enclose the figure. These forms, associated with the nineteenth-century
feminine ideal, also picture a woman's space as a closed world turned in
on itself. |
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