Berthe Morisot was the only female painter that was a founding member of the Impressionists and was prominently featured in seven of their eight exhibitions. So why is it that we're all much less familiar with her works than any of the other impressionists?
Morisot was born into an upper-middle-class family and had many advantages. She was lucky enough to be financially well-off, educated, charming, and beautiful. Unlike her male counterparts, she was not permitted to attend l'Ecole des Beaux Arts, a prestigious school of fine arts in France that only opened its doors to women in 1897. And so she did not receive formal art training.
Thankfully, she had the support of her parents to pursue a career as an artist. They built her and her sister Edma, an art studio where the girls could train and learn, making studies of old masters' paintings at the Louvre and studying under the private tutelage of Camille Corot — A respected landscape painter — who taught them both Plein-air painting — The act of painting outdoors.
Her artistic style gained momentum and evolved aesthetically when she met the artist Édouard Manet in 1868. Their admiration for one another helped expand both their minds and their boundaries about their art. Many suspect that they were in love. She sat for him in many of his paintings and he hung three of her works in his bedroom. Now, we won't ever know the true nature of their relationship, but we can say for a fact that above all they learned from one another.
We can even see his influence on her work here, where she experimented with unprimed canvases in the same way he did. She eventually married Édouard's brother—Eugène—in 1874. He was mild-mannered, kind, and above all, her biggest supporter.
He decided to become a stay-at-home husband and left his job with the French Ministry of Justice to take care of their only daughter, Julie. Morisot made Eugène the only male subject in all of her pieces, perhaps to express her gratitude for supporting her career above his.
The motif of her choice was women; at all stages of their lives, the children, the working women, the wives, and the mothers. As a woman, she could access the private moments of the females around her. At the time, and even now, when discussing Morisot's oeuvre, critics focus on terms that highlight the femininity of her works. Terms such as "delicate", "intuitive", and "flirtatious." What these terms don't take into consideration is how radical her choice of depicting women actually was. At the time, painting female subjects was considered superficial, yet she did so because she was excluded from other sites of leisure around Paris, that have been depicted in her peers' works. Due to the public's attitude towards women at the time, she couldn't paint outdoors without a male chaperone, as it was deemed "improper." Even her choosing a career as an artist was frowned upon by general societal standards.
So capturing interior scenes where women spent most of their time was what she was limited to, but how she did it was revolutionary. What she did, no one else could replicate.
She depicted subjects through a distinctly female filter — a female gaze. She portrayed them as individuals with power and put them center stage. She never objectified them as is commonly seen in other works of the same time period, but rather guides the viewer in seeing them how they want to be portrayed, to feel what they feel in the moments captured.
Her works are all quite impressive, but I believe the painting that best exemplifies her individuality and skills as an artist is "Woman at her Toilette" painted in 1875-1880.
