Berthe Morisot

The only woman to show in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 — and in seven of the eight total — Morisot was not a peripheral participant in the movement but one of its most technically inventive members. Born in Bourges into an upper-middle-class family (her grandfather was Fragonard), she and her sister Edma were given painting lessons that were supposed to result in parlor accomplishments; both became serious artists, though Edma gave up after marriage. Morisot trained for a time with Corot, who recognized her talent, and befriended Édouard Manet in the late 1860s. She posed for several of his most important canvases and in 1874 married his brother Eugène. Her painting style developed a feathery, dissolving handling that was entirely her own — more daring in its incompleteness than Monet's, less concerned with structural control than Degas's. She worked quickly and with a visible pleasure in the material act of painting itself; her brushstrokes are often barely connected, leaving white canvas visible between them, creating a shimmer of light that no other Impressionist quite duplicated. Her subjects — domestic interiors, women in gardens, children at the seaside, mother-and-child groups — were dismissed in her lifetime as appropriately 'feminine' and have been reconsidered since as subjects chosen with precise intention: she painted exactly what she could see and what interested her. She died of pneumonia in 1895 at fifty-four, and a major retrospective organized by Degas and others in 1896 helped establish her reputation. Contemporary scholarship has placed her firmly at the center of the movement rather than at its margins, and her prices at auction have risen substantially as her critical standing has been revised upward.