Berthe Morisot: A Forgotten Impressionist Pioneer

When in 1874 a group of artists rejected by the official Salon organized their own exhibition at the studio of photographer Nadar, among the names of Monet, Renoir, and Degas, there was one woman’s name. Berthe Morisot was not a guest or a decorative addition. She was a co-founder of a movement that turned the art world upside down.

Great-Grandmother in the Shadow of Fragonard

Morisot’s family history smelled of oil paint long before she was born. Her great-grandmother was a relative of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the Rococo master who painted for the court of Louis XV. This is an interesting heritage, as Fragonard was famous for paintings full of lightness and sensuality, and the Impressionism Berthe would later co-create also rejected the academic corset. As if artistic genes skipped generations.

Berthe’s father, Edmé Tiburce, worked as a prefect in the Cher department and studied architecture at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Her mother came from a family with artistic connections. In 1852, the whole family moved to Paris. Berthe was eleven, and the city by the Seine was just beginning its metamorphosis under Baron Haussmann. New boulevards, new cafés, new air. A perfect stage for a future revolution in art.

The three Morisot sisters, Yves, Edma, and Berthe, received private drawing lessons. Not unusual—daughters of wealthy families were routinely taught to sketch flowers and still lifes. However, the Morisot sisters took these lessons more seriously than was typical. Their first teacher was Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne, then Joseph Guichard. It was Guichard who opened the doors of the Louvre to them.

The Museum with a Chaperone

From 1858, Berthe and Edma spent hours in the Louvre galleries, copying the works of old masters. This was the nature of artistic education before academies were open to women. 

There was a catch, though. Young women were not allowed in the museum without a chaperone. Every visit required the company of their mother or another respectable person. Furthermore, the path to formal education was tightly closed to them.

Imagine the scene: two young women sitting before a Rubens or a Titian, brushes in hand, with a vigilant chaperone behind them, ensuring that no man came too close. The sisters learned their craft under conditions we would now call absurd. Yet it was in these very circumstances that Berthe started realizing she desired more than just salon watercolors.

Guichard also introduced them to the works of Gavarni, a draftsman and caricaturist. An interesting choice, as Gavarni was a master at observing everyday life, street scenes, and ordinary people in ordinary situations—exactly what would later become the domain of Impressionism. Before Morisot saw her first Monet, she already understood that art could be close to life, not just myth.

The Sister Who Left

Berthe and Edma painted together for more than a decade. Two brushes, one vision, shared afternoons in the studio. In 1869, the partnership broke apart. Edma married naval officer Adolphe Pontillon and moved to Cherbourg. Motherhood and household duties consumed her time. She picked up her paintbrush less and less until she finally stopped altogether.

The preserved letters between the sisters reveal a deep bond and an equally profound sadness. Edma wrote to Berthe that she often mentally returned to their former studio, longing to experience, even for a quarter of an hour, the atmosphere they shared for years. It was not envy, but a longing for her pre-marriage self, a version of herself that could paint.

Berthe chose a different path. In 1864, at the age of twenty-three, she debuted at the prestigious Salon de Paris. The official exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts, judges in robes, crowds in top hats. Her works were shown there for the next six years in a row. Success by every rule of the era. And then she did something no one expected.

Rebellion in the Photographer’s Studio

In the spring of 1874, Morisot sided with the rejected. The first Impressionist exhibition was held in the studio of Nadar, a photographer and balloonist as eccentric as the event itself. Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley. And her. The only woman among the founders.

The criticism was crushing. Reviewers called the works daubs, unfinished sketches, paintings that looked like jokes. The term Impressionist was coined as an insult. Morisot could have returned to the safety of the Salon, where she was already known and appreciated. She did not. She participated in seven out of eight subsequent group exhibitions, missing only one.

That same year, she married Eugène Manet, the brother of her friend and fellow artist, Édouard Manet. Marriage to the brother of a famous painter could have relegated her to the shadows. Instead, the opposite happened. Eugène supported her career, helped organize exhibitions, and handled practical matters. An unusual arrangement for the era, when an artist’s wife usually ended up as housekeeper and muse.

Twenty years later, in 1894, critic Gustave Geffroy named Morisot one of the three great ladies of Impressionism, alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. Les trois grandes dames. A term that sounds like a compliment, but carries a hint of condescension. Great ladies, not great artists. As if gender still required a separate category. Morisot died a year later, at the age of fifty-four, leaving behind canvases full of light and women looking somewhere beyond the frame.