Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Features  
Subject: 20th Century  19th Century    

On 3 April 1876 Albert Wolff, the irascible and reactionary art critic of Le Figaro, warned his readers about a scandalous new exhibition at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris. A group of artists known as “the Impressionists” were showing what he regarded as some of the most wretched daubs ever painted. The guilty men included Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. “There’s also a woman in the group, as in most notorious gangs,” Wolff added. “She’s called Berthe Morisot. In her case, a feminine grace is maintained amid the outpourings of a delirious mind.” The only girl in the Impressionist gang took the attack in her stride. She had other things to worry about, as she continued to meet the challenge of living up to the nineteenth-century French bourgeois ideal of a wife and mother, while simultaneously pursuing a career as a serious painter.

Morisot was a founder-member of Impressionism but most writers on the subject have presented her as a bit of an also-ran. Being a woman has counted against her, albeit in different ways at different times. She was patronised by many of her contemporaries (although not by her fellow-Impressionists) as a petit-maitre whose work might be allowed a certain “feminine grace” but could never exhibit true genius, an exclusively male preserve. Her work faded almost completely from view after her death and even when her reputation was rehabilitated in the 1950s and 1960s, largely owing to the efforts of pioneering feminist art historians, the suspicion lingered that she had benefited from special pleading and had only been rediscovered because she was a woman. All of which may help to explain why, at a time when Impressionist art has been at the zenith of its popularity, there has been no major exhibition of Morisot’s work for more than forty years. “Berthe Morisot: 1841-1895”, a full-scale retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille containing more than 100 paintings, pastels and watercolours, will doubtless spark a renewed revival of interest in the most persistently underrated Impressionist. The exhibition, which opens on March 10, offers a rare opportunity to see Morisot’s oeuvre as a whole, to witness the skill and single-mindedness with which she pursued her vocation as an artist – and to appreciate the distinctive and original contribution which she made to the painting of her era.

She was born in solidly middle-class Bourges, the daughter of a well-to-do civil service functionary who could claim direct descent from the great Rococo painter Pierre-Honore Fragonard. From a relatively early age she and her favourite sister Edma were taught drawing and painting, which, along with needlework, playing the piano and other such “accomplishments”, were thought to enhance a young woman’s marriageability. But young Berthe and Edma took a more than merely  conventional interest in art and when the family moved to Passy, a suburb of Paris, just as they were entering their teens, the girls began making regular visits to the Louvre to copy the Old Masters. Their tutor was a minor painter called Joseph Guichard, who was positively disconcerted by the enthusiasm shown by his two young pupils. “Considering the character of your daughters,” he warned their mother, “my teaching will not endow them with minor drawing-room attainments; they will become painters. Do you realise what this means? In the upper-class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary, I might almost say catastrophic.” In the event, only Berthe held fast to her ambition to be an artist, although Edma continued to paint and exhibit until her marriage, in 1869, to a naval officer.

A year earlier, the sisters met Edouard Manet, whom Berthe Morisot would always regard as the father of the Impressionist movement. She immediately impressed Manet with her intelligence, her emotional intensity and her beauty. He painted more portraits of her than of anyone else in his life, a series of what seem, in effect, to have been love letters in oil on canvas: “At last, he’s painted a portrait of his own wife: about time too,” noted Morisot’s scandalised mother in March 1869. Whether that love was ever consummated, or not, is a mystery that will probably never be solved (Morisot eventually married not Edouard Manet but his brother, Eugene), but she certainly fell in love with his painting. She was moved not just by the brilliant, dandyish virtuosity of Manet’s style but also by the depth of his commitment to the depiction of contemporary life, which matched that of the new generation of literary realists led by novelists such as Flaubert and Zola. The poet Charles Baudelaire had called for “a painting of modern life”: an art above all of the city, responsive to the many changes transforming the urban world of the nineteenth century. Manet was such a painter. Berthe Morisot set out to be one too.

Her sex, as she well knew, was the main barrier to that ambition. Unlike men, women – especially upper-middle-class women – were by no means free to come and go as they chose. For a woman to try to become a “painter of modern life” in the sense that Manet, or Degas, or Monet were – to frequent bars or whorehouses or industrial docklands in search of her subject matter – was socially taboo. Even in the most salubrious parts of town, she had to be chaperoned. Morisot’s predicament was eloquently expressed by the equally ambitious (if considerably less talented) young painter Marie Bashkirtseff, who wrote in her diary: “What I long for is the freedom of going about alone, of coming and going, of sitting in the seats in the Tuileries, and especially in the Luxembourg, of stopping and looking at the artistic shops, of entering the churches and museums, of walking about the old streets at night; that’s what I long for; and that’s the freedom without which one can’t become a real artist. Do you imagine I can get much good from what I see, chaperoned as I am, and when, in order to go to the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion, or my family?”

Morisot’s brilliantly straightforward solution to this problem was to work within the limitations imposed upon her by her life, and by the moeurs of her time. She became just as true a “painter of modern life” as any of her contemporaries, but one working in a very particular corner of “modernity”. Morisot became the nineteenth century’s most single-minded painter of bourgeois female experience.

As the poet Paul Valery said of her, “she lived her painting, and painted her life”. She painted women at home; women working; women pregnant; women looking after their children. Her work can (and often has been) seen as merely “feminine” in a sentimental, saccharine way: trivially fixated on the banal facts of domestic experience,  for all the flickering, avant-garde “Impressionism” of its style. This is not only to misinterpret her art, but to sweeten it unduly. Morisot’s painting radiates a keen and uneasy  intelligence, a deeply thoughtful – almost Jane Austen-like – awareness of the moods and relationships that lie behind the various moments in the various human lives which she records. One of her achievements was to deepen the theme of the woman in an interior in ways that perhaps only a woman herself could have done. She painted a fascinating series of pictures of young ladies in evening dress, radiant but also vulnerable, their beauty shot through with a powerful spirit of doubt or self-deprecation – pictures which capture the sense that going out can be just as much of an ordeal as an entertainment. Her work of this kind is sometimes erotic, but not often or at least not simply so. It is as if she paints the subject from the inside, rather than from the glamorous outside, so what we are left looking at is the texture of a thought, or a feeling.

Her own family was a frequent source of inspiration. Painting her sister Edma in the months of her confinement, sitting in an armchair by an open window, Morisot brilliantly conveys an unsettling mixture of ennui and foreboding – partly her sister’s, but partly perhaps also her own. Life goes on outside, represented by a blurry fragment of the city seen through the window, but here in the room all is silent and stifled. Edma stares intently at a painted fan. Morisot’s work is often more than faintly melancholic. Especially in the late 1860s and early 1870s, following her sister’s marriage but before her own, she painted women who seem possessed by lassitude or by a sense of their own apartness from the busy, thriving metropolis apostrophised by Baudelaire and painted by Morisot’s own male contemporaries. View of Paris from the Trocadero, a little known picture on loan to Lille from Santa Barbara, is perhaps her masterpiece in this vein of understated alienation, which  shows two women and a little girl before a balustrade in front of a meadow above and away from the city. Paris stretches out before them, but the women have their back to it and only the little girl stares into the heart of the city, a transfixed but lonely little person in an acre of empty space. It is a wonderful picture about being cut off from life.

Morisot’s art is by no means uniformly despondent or dispiriting. Her painting The Cradle, shown at the first Impressionist exhibition, is an original and subtle secular reworking of the theme of the madonna and child. A young woman stares at her sleeping child, in a cradle, under a veil. She seems full of tenderness, mingled with a certain apprehension. The veil blurs the baby’s features, making him or her seem appropriately unformed, while the instinctive bond between mother and child is suggested in the way each lightly mirrors the other’s position. When Morisot and Eugene Manet conceived their only child, Julie, the artist placed her at the centre of both her work and her life. Gradually Morisot seems to have reconciled herself to the ordinariness of ordinary life and begun to see, in it, a kind of enlightened ideal of being.

Not long before she died, Morisot lamented the speeding-up of modern existence. “No more of those lovely moments of leisure, of that picturesque languor,” she wrote. “Everyone is restless and fidgety, no one understands that there’s nothing like two hours reclining on a chaise longue – life is a dream – and the dream is more real than a reality; in dreams, one is oneself, truly oneself – if one has a soul it’s there.” Many of her later paintings seem to turn home, the place she once felt so confining, into a kind of dream: a lush green idyll, veiled in the mystery of an almost inchoate style of depiction, where Eugene Manet, Berthe Morisot and their daughter Julie could live in a blissful state of prelapsarian innocence. The idyll did not last – Eugene Manet, like Edouard, died young, and Morisot followed not long after, cut down prematurely by pneumonia. But “the dream” still survives in her last paintings.