Berthe Morisot rarely traveled far for a subject, and almost nothing dramatic happens in her pictures. She painted the people she lived with and the women her household employed, mostly in rooms, gardens and parks. Yet one of her calmest scenes was carried out of a London gallery in 1956 by Irish students who wanted it in Dublin.
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A Painter Who Worked Close to Home
Berthe Morisot is best known as one of the painters who founded Impressionism. In 1874, when a group of painters decided to show their work outside the official Salon, in the old studio of Nadar, the photographer, she was the only female painter among them.
Her subject was the life she was allowed to lead. A young lady of her class could not set up an easel alone in the city center, so she painted at home, in gardens and in parks, and used the people closest to her as models.
Most of the twelve show her own family or the women paid to work in her house, and they run from 1869 to 1893, two years before her death. I kept the paintings people look for most, and added a few that lists of her work tend to leave out.
12. The Harbor at Lorient (1869)
A pink parasol half hides a young woman in white, seated on the stone wall of a quay. Beside her, the water takes up nearly the whole canvas, a wide harbor with moored sailing ships and a line of houses on the opposite shore. The Harbor at Lorient was painted the summer after a marriage separated two sisters who had always painted together.
The young woman is Edma Morisot, the painter's older sister. In 1869 Edma became the wife of a naval officer, Adolphe Pontillon, and followed him to Lorient, the navy port in Brittany.
Until then the two sisters had never needed to write to each other. Now they did. Edma missed painting, and Berthe answered with firm advice: "Do not revile your fate." That summer she went to stay with Edma and painted her on the quay.
Back in Paris, she gave the canvas to Édouard Manet, the painter whose younger brother she would later marry.
Four years later, the picture came back into the sisters' story. Late in 1873 the painter Edgar Degas was gathering artists for an exhibition of their own, and he wrote to their mother that Edma "was a painter like her sister, and could be again."
Edma sent nothing. When the show opened in 1874, she was in it only as the woman on the quay, in this canvas, hung under the plain title Marine, although Manet himself had refused to take part.
At a Glance
Artist: Berthe Morisot (1841 to 1895)
Painted: 1869
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 43.5 × 73 cm (17 1/8 × 28 3/4 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery of Art, Washington
11. The Wet Nurse (1879)
Under a straw hat, a woman nurses a baby in a sunlit garden. The strokes are so quick that the green of the lawn runs into her dress, and the baby is little more than a patch of white. The child is the painter's own. The woman feeding her is not her mother.