By James Brewer
She brought to her canvases “a palette of crushed flower petals,” rhapsodised one 19th century art critic about Berthe Morisot. Her beautiful paintings were already collected in her lifetime alongside those of contemporary greats including Renoir. Now for the first time in Britain since 1950, exquisite works of the First Lady of impressionism can be appreciated as a magnificent array (until recently they have had meagre display in France too), thanks to a stunning exhibition put on by Dulwich Picture Gallery.
The south London gallery partners with Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, to show more than 30 of Morisot’s most important paintings from international collections. The French museum boasts among its treasures much fine output of Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet. Dulwich’s semi-secluded long gallery provides an ideal temporary home for the intimate scenes characteristic of Morisot.
A founding member of the Impressionist group, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) contributed to the genre a distinctive, flowing style of rapid yet calibrated brushstrokes. Rather than making preliminary sketches, she preferred to paint directly onto the canvas. While her male counterparts depicted life in the streets, cafes and theatres of Paris, her art reflected her more sheltered existence as a woman of the comfortable upper middle-class.
She was sharply aware of women being relegated to second-class status in society and art: “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that’s all I would have asked, for I know I’m worth as much as they.”
Berthe’s soft-hued shades of delicious silver and blue – often mediated by watercolours and pastels — were applied in strokes that produced a radiant lustre and that aligned her with the principles defining the impressionist movement.
Renoir declared her “the last elegant and ‘feminine’ artist that we have had since Fragonard.” It was an appropriate comment, for she was a granddaughter of the Rococo master Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Strikingly echoing this heritage, her Self-Portrait of 1885 appears in this exhibition alongside Fragonard’s Young Woman (c 1769) which is in Dulwich’s permanent collection. Paul-Albert Girard – a painter of portraits, landscapes, and Orientalist scenes – exclaimed of her oeuvre: “It is the 18th century modernised.” That seems to have been her guiding light in her depictions together with an instinctive sensibility to everyday life, fashion, interiors and private scenes.
It was the critic Charles Ephrussi (1849-1905) who made the remark about Morisot painting with a palette of crushed flower petals, “in order to spread them later on her canvas with airy, witty touches, thrown down a little haphazardly.” He averred, as already noted did others similarly: “This pleasant vivacity, sparkling and frivolous, recalls Fragonard.” The wealthy Ephrussi acquired more than 40 works by Morisot, Mary Cassatt (another of the few grande dames of impressionism), Degas, Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and Renoir.
Fellow artist Henri Fantin-Latour introduced Morisot to Édouard Manet, and the two became close friends, exchanging ideas throughout their careers. Morisot appears in many paintings by Édouard (1832-1883). In 1874 Morisot married his brother, Eugène, a writer and painter.
The curators are unstinting in underlining the connection between her work and that of her French predecessors, hanging 15 works from the earlier epoch for comparison. They draw on new research and previously unpublished archival material from the Musée Marmottan to trace the roots of her inspiration, while highlighting an originality of vision. In addition to Fragonard, artists including François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and Antoine Watteau are recalled.
After falling out of favour following the French Revolution, the art of the ancien régime was beginning to be snapped up again in Morisot’s time and reintroduced to the public through exhibitions and new rooms at the Louvre. Morisot copied works by Boucher; experimented with red chalk, a technique closely associated with Rococo drawing; and unlike her compatriots, she admired the English painters Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and George Romney.
The independent-minded Morisot was distinguished in her bearing and intelligence, according to the art historian Véronique Bouruet Aubertot. In the self-portrait of 1885 Morisot stands tall, with a direct gaze iterated by her bold brushwork, asserting her professional standing. In what may be a claim to be worthy of greater recognition, she paints a red flower on her bodice which resembles the ribbon of the légion d’honneur, France’s highest order of merit which was often bestowed on male artists.
Morisot offered glimpses into women’s private spaces in which she captures their feelings and emotions. In the appealing Woman at her Toilette (1875-80), Morisot takes a standpoint that differs from the male Rococo painters who, working with an all-pervasive male gaze to attract private collectors, would put the emphasis on eroticism. Morisot instead creates a mood of contemplation and introspection as the woman fixing her hair regards herself in the mirror. Woman at her Toilette displays the vulnerability of subject and authenticity that makes her studies of this kind so captivating.
Adapting from Boucher, known for his erotic pastoral and mythological scenes, after visiting the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours in 1892 to study one of his paintings she produced Two Nymphs, from Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé. The nymphs embracing beside a woodland stream are taken from the lower left of Boucher’s depiction of the sun god appearing in a blaze of glory to the shepherdess Issé. Monet was impressed by the way she made the image her own and asked that it be included in the 1896 memorial exhibition of her art. Monet later used a similar combination of short and longer brushstrokes and pastel colouring in his paintings of water lilies.
Many of her scenes are set in her home, which enabled her to paint out of sight of curious or distracting passers-by. When she did paint outside, she often asked her husband Eugène to accompany her – she would start work at 6.30am to avoid the crowds, and then at nine return home with her model of the day for a cup of coffee. She used professional models, but often members of her family, engaged in activities that reflected her way of life.
Her domestic scenes allow the viewer into confidential spaces, but with a romantic play of light.
In the picture Reclining Woman in Grey, 1873, oil on canvas, the woman’s pose recalls themes of the era of Madame de Pompadour who sported fashionable gowns, but also was a practitioner and patron of the arts including the Sèvres porcelain factory. The vigour of brushwork contrasts with the stillness of the model in silver-grey dress resting on a sofa. In the lower left is a blue and white 18th century Chinese porcelain planter, a gift from to Berthe from Édouard Manet. Morisot’s Resting from 1892 is of a similar and even more placid nature than Reclining Woman.
Works such as At the Ball (1875) reflect the elegance of the fête galante tradition that had come to prominence with Antoine Watteau’s celebration of elegantly costumed socialites. Morisot’s portrait of a glamorous sitter with her fan (as a bonus we get to see the real fan in a vitrine) is hung alongside Watteau’s Les Plaisirs du Bal (c 1715-17) from Dulwich’s collection.
Morisot was impressed by the success in London of fellow French artist James Tissot (1836-1902) and even briefly considered moving to England. The curators show Tissot’s oil on canvas The Ball on Shipboard from around 1874, held by the Tate Gallery, in which a crowd of revellers enjoys the bright sunlight that catches to advantage their fashionable outfits. The woman in a straw sailor hat, standing by the railing, was at one time mistakenly identified as Queen Alexandra, the daughter of Christian IX of Denmark who married the future Edward VII in 1863.
During their honeymoon in 1875 Berthe and Eugène visited London museums and private collections including the Duke of Westminster’s grand Grosvenor House. Berthe admired Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, which was painted in 1770 as a representation of boyhood, specifically to challenge an assertion by Reynolds that it was impossible to create a successful predominantly blue picture. Her eventual response, in 1892, was to paint a girl in blue, Lucie Leon at the Piano. Berthe’s daughter Julie later noted: “It was hot, and Lucie would have preferred to play croquet rather than to pose at the piano; she was an unbearable model but, as Mother overcame every difficulty, she created a marvellous portrait – all blue like the Blue Boy by Gainsborough.”
Another impatient model was husband Eugène. During their honeymoon she depicted him – in Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight – looking through the sitting room window of Globe Cottage at Cowes, gazing onto the Parade, where a nanny escorts a little girl. Beyond them yachts and steamboats gather at the pier. Windows were a recurring theme for Morisot, as a metaphor for transparency, looking into the mind of her subjects.
In 1885, Morisot wrote: “To me, it seems that Rubens is perhaps the only painter to have completely rendered beauty: the moist gaze, the shadows of eyelashes, the transparent skin, the silky hair, the graceful posture… It is however, right to add those of the last century, who have also rendered it with more affectation, but plenty of charm” including representatives of the English school.
Deeply moving is Julie Manet with her Greyhound Laerte (1893), one of nine paintings on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet, many receiving their first showing in the UK. It focuses on the artist’s downcast daughter mourning and caressing her dog after the recent death of her father, whose absence is symbolised by an empty Louis XVI-style chair. Within two years Berthe would succumb to influenza, in March 1895, while caring for Julie, who was just 16. On Berthe’s death certificate, under the word ‘profession’ was written ‘none.’
Berthe Morisot had been set on becoming an artist from a young age and was fortunate to be encouraged by her mother to begin learning from respected artists such as Joseph Guichard and Camille Corot. Her mother held salons frequented by figures she could in her early years rightly look up to. When only 23, Morisot exhibited for the first time at the Salon de Paris and then at six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she took part in the Salon des Refusés, an exhibition of works rejected by the staid jury of the official Paris Salon, putting her among a distinguished group which included Cézanne, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. By the mid-1870s she was one of impressionism’s most influential figures.
The exhibition is meticulously and empathetically curated by Dr Lois Oliver (curator at the Royal Academy, associate adjunct professor in the history of art at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in London and a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art); Dr Marianne Mathieu (scientific director of the exhibition) and Dr Dominique d’Arnoult (independent curator and professor of art history at the University of Lausanne).
Jennifer Scott, director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, described Morisot as an innovator and trailblazer. Dr Oliver added: “Morisot was modest, saying that all she wanted to do was ‘to capture something of what is going by, just something, the smallest thing.’ She was one of the greatest of the impressionist artists, and yet her work has rarely been shown in the UK.”
The Dulwich exhibition is accompanied by a splendidly illustrated scholarly catalogue in English and French, edited under the scientific direction of Dr Mathieu.
Captions in full:
Woman at her Toilette, 1875- 80. By Berthe Morisot. Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Stickney Fund.
Berthe Morisot, Self-Portrait, 1885 © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
At the Ball, 1875. By Berthe Morisot. © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
Reclining Woman in Grey, 1879. By Berthe Morisot. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
Les Plaisirs du Bal, c 1715- 17. By Antoine Watteau. Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery.
The Ball on Shipboard, c 1874. Oil on canvas. By James Tissot. Tate: presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, 1937.
Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight, 1885. By Berthe Morisot. © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
Two Nymphs, from Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé, after François Boucher,1892. Oil on canvas. By Berthe Morisot. © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
Julie Manet with her Greyhound Laerte, 1893. By Berthe Morisot. © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
Lucie Leon at the Piano, 1892. By Berthe Morisot. Private collection.
Young Woman, c 1769. By Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism is at Dulwich Picture Gallery until September 10, 2023.
