Berthe Morisot: Paintings

By Valene Tolman

Berthe Morisot was French painter and printmaker and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. As the child of upper middle-class parents, she was given appropriate education. In 1858 she and her sister Edma left to study under Joseph-Benoit Guichard, a pupil of Ingres and Delacroix. In the same year they registered as copyists in the Louvre, copying Veronese and Rubens. The sisters were introduced to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot in 1861. Morisot formed a close familiarity with Manet, who became her brother-in-law, and she served as model for several of his best-known paintings. They both deeply influenced each other's artistic development. Her own later work inclined toward pure Impressionism in its representation of light, while keeping an unusual smoothness of brushwork. Her early subject matter included landscapes and marine scenes; later she most frequently painted tranquil portraits of mothers and children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valene Tolman
• Release date: Jan 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9786050352733

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Berthe Morisot: Paintings

By Valene Tolman

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Copyright © 2015 by Valene Tolman

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Berthe Morisot: Paintings

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Foreword

Berthe Morisot (1841 – 1895) was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of les trois grandes dames of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.

In 1864, she exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Sponsored by the government, and judged by academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874 she joined the rejected Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, which included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. It was held at the studio of the photographer Nadar.

She became the sister-in-law of her friend and colleague, Édouard Manet, when she married his brother, Eugène.

Morisot was born in Bourges, Cher, France, into a successful bourgeois family. According to family tradition, the family had included one of the most prolific Rococo painters of the ancien régime, Fragonard, whose handling of color and expressive, confident brushwork influenced later painters. Both Berthe and her sister, Edma Morisot,