Of all the major figures in the history of modern art, the French painter Berthe Morisot (1841-95) is perhaps the least known. Yet her expressionist brushwork and unsurpassed ability as a colorist caused at least one critic to dub her the quintessential Impressionist. Just after her death in 1895 at the age of fifty-four, the Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme stated: "[Morisot's] work, now completed, is worthy, in the estimation of some of the great revolutionary artists who considered her a comrade-in-arms, to rank beside that produced by any one of them, and is intimately, exquisitely linked with the history of painting during an epoch of this century." Her works were admired by the younger painters Maurice Denis, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edouard Vuillard. In the early twentieth century, Paul Valery wrote, "The qualities which [Berthe Morisot] alone among the Impressionist possessed, and which, besides, are of the rarest in painting, can now be appreciated. They are of a subtlety hard to isolate or define."
However, despite these prophecies, Morisot's work remains unfamiliar compared to that of her more famous colleagues. Her known oil paintings, which number about 425, are mostly still in private collections. When her works are in museums, they are often hidden away in storage. During the 1950s there was a brief reexamination of her works--perhaps spurred by the Abstract Expressionist movement whose active brushwork and unorthodox finish Morisot's own style anticipated. With words similar to those used seventy-five years later by critic of Abstract Expressionism, Morisot's paintings were dismissed in 1870s as being inferior to "schoolchildren's doodles." Despite the current scholarship focused specifically on women artists, Morisot still remains relatively unappreciated; ironically, as recently as 1979, even the feminist press dismissed her as a "lightweight."
Conflict With Social Strictures
Morisot was born in Bourges, France, on January 14, 1841, to a wealthy, cultured haut bourgeois family. When Berthe and her older sister Edma were teenagers they began art studies. Although their segment of society had long considered drawing an important part of a girl's education, one of the Morisots' first teachers, Joseph Guichard, foresaw that his pupils' devotion to art could one day bring them into conflict with the strictures of their social circle. In a letter he warned their mother: "Given your daughters' natural gifts, it will not be petty drawing room talents that they will achieve; they will become painters. Are you fully aware of what that means? It will be revolutionary--I would almost say catastrophic--in your high Bourgeois milieu."
In her early thirties, commenting on her role as a woman and artist, she wrote, "I am sad, sad as one can be … I am reading Darwin. … What I see most clearly is that my situation is impossible from every point of view." One of her earliest biographers, Theodore Duret, felt Morisot's elite position in society "continually obscured her reputation as an artist" and added that because she was a woman, the critics treated her as a dilettante. Certainly, with the exception of Marie Antoinette's court painter Elizabeth Vigee-Lberun and the famed animal painter Rosa Bonheur (1822-99), Morisot (like her critics) had few female role models. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not even accept women students until two years after her death.
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