Berthe Morisot (in Landscape)

Berthe Morisot born January 14, 1841 in Bourges -  died March 2, 1895 in Paris  

Berthe Morisot was an important representative of French Impressionism. She came from a middle-class and not incapable art-loving family. Early on, the mother recognized her daughter's great artistic talent and financed her first drawing lessons with the then well-known painters Geoffroy-Alphonso Chocarne (1797-1857) and Joseph Guichard (1830-1877). Initially copied Berthe Morisot the Old Masters in the Louvre in Paris. She quickly became acquainted with a circle of young painters around Édouard Manet. Her fellow painters quickly recognized the seriousness and professionalism of Berthe Morisot, who, however, tired of copying and drawing Old Masters, went out into the great outdoors to devote herself to plein air painting at the same time as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.

Around 1860, Berthe Morisot met the then 64-year-old Camille Corot, whose student she became. A stroke of luck for her, as at that time women were not admitted to either the Academy of Fine Arts or the Académie Julian in Paris. Under Camille Corot's influence, Berthe Morisot became an important Impressionist landscape painter, whose unity and firmness of the composition impressed. The artist did not explicitly participate in the impressionist color experiments such as the decomposition of colors. Also around 1860, Berthe Morisot became the preferred model of Édouard Manet, whose brother Eugène married her in 1877.

In addition to landscape painting, Berthe Morisot now also turned to portrait painting. In 1874 Berthe Morisot participated in the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris. A year later, in 1875, together with Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, she organized an auction in a Parisian auction house, where she achieved the highest prices. Disappointed, the other painters initially pulled away from the Exhibition events while Berthe Morisot participated in all other Impressionist exhibitions until the eighth and last in 1886 (no participation in 1879).

Berthe continued to receive important impulses for her artistic development also on the occasion of a visit to London (1875), during which she became acquainted with the works of John Constable and William Turner. Paint application and brushwork were now much looser and her color palette brightened. After the death of her teacher and patron Édouard Manet (1883), Berthe Morisot changed her style of painting by moving further away from reality, but quickly returned to Impressionism and remained one of its most important representatives.  

Text © Jürgen Banse, 2015