Berthe Morisot

The life of Berthe Morisot,
scene by scene

1. 1857–58Paris

   Berthe, about sixteen, and her older sister Edma are taking drawing lessons from Joseph Guichard. Their mother meant the lessons to be a polite accomplishment for well-off girls. Guichard took her aside with a warning. Her daughters, he said, would not stop at pretty drawing-room skills. They would become painters.

   He was right. The sisters registered as copyists at the Louvre and copied the old masters. Later they studied with the landscape painter Camille Corot, who sent them outdoors to paint. In 1864 both sisters had pictures accepted at the Salon for the first time.

2. 1868Paris

   At the Louvre, the painter Henri Fantin-Latour introduced Berthe to Édouard Manet. That year she posed for Manet's The Balcony. She is the dark-haired woman seated at the green railing. The picture hung at the Salon the following spring.

   In March 1869 Edma married a naval officer, Adolphe Pontillon, and moved to the port of Lorient in Brittany. With marriage she all but gave up painting. The sisters wrote to each other for years, and Berthe carried on alone.

3. 1870Paris

   The Salon deadline is days away. Berthe asked Manet what he thought of her large portrait of her mother and Edma. Instead of giving advice, he picked up a brush and repainted much of her mother's dress himself. Berthe was deeply upset, but the picture went to the Salon that year anyway.

   The Pink Dress belongs to these same years. The sitter is a young woman named Albertie-Marguerite Carré. She leans back on a gray-blue sofa, a black ribbon at her throat. Behind her, a pink planter painted with birds and an open fan sit on a table. Look at her sleeves and ruffles. They are made of a few quick strokes and little else.

   Painted around this timeThe Pink Dress (Albertie-Marguerite Carré, later Madame Ferdinand-Henri Himmes, 1854–1935)
4. 1874Paris

   In April a group of artists opened their own show in the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines. It became known as the first Impressionist exhibition. Berthe was the only woman painter in it. One of her pictures there, The Cradle, shows Edma watching over her sleeping baby, Blanche.

   That December Berthe married Eugène Manet, Édouard's younger brother, who also painted. She kept her own name on her work and went on showing as Berthe Morisot.

5. 1875Paris

   On March 24, at the Hôtel Drouot auction house, Renoir, Monet, Sisley, and Berthe put seventy-three of their pictures up for sale together. The sale was Renoir's idea. The room turned rowdy fast. According to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, the auctioneer had to call in the police to keep the arguments from turning into fistfights.

6. 1880Paris

   In November 1878 her daughter Julie was born. Berthe sent nothing to the fourth Impressionist show the next spring. Of the eight group exhibitions, it was the only one she missed.

   At the fifth show, in 1880, she hung Woman at Her Toilette, and her work drew strong praise. A woman back from a ball reaches up to take down her hair. Her earrings and black velvet neck ribbon are still on. The mirror is a blur of lavender and gray, so we never see her face in it. Now look along the lower left edge of the mirror. Her signature is painted right there.

   Painted around this timeWoman at Her Toilette
7. 1894Paris

   Eugène died in 1892, leaving Berthe and thirteen-year-old Julie on their own. In March 1894 the collection of the critic Théodore Duret went up for sale, and it included her Young Woman in a Ball Gown. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé pushed for the state to buy it, and the painting went to the Luxembourg Museum. It was the first of her paintings to enter a French public collection.

8. 1895Paris

   Early in 1895 Julie came down with influenza. Berthe nursed her and fell ill herself. Julie recovered. Berthe died of pneumonia on March 2, at fifty-four. The day before, she wrote a last letter to her daughter.

   A year later Durand-Ruel's gallery held a large retrospective of her work, with Degas, Monet, and Renoir leading the effort. Here on this site you can zoom in close on her pink dress and her woman at the mirror.