Great artists

Berthe, Our Lady of the Impressionists

Genoa and Turin celebrate Berthe Morisot who, against the commonplace, followed her passion for painting, became Manet's model, portrayed the inner world of women and wanted to sell her works

16 October 2024

5' min read

The last outrage was the gravestone in the Passy cemetery. It said: 'Without profession', and then: 'Widow of Eugène Manet'. Nothing else. But Berthe Morisot was used to outrage and hardship in those intense 54 years of her life. At the first Impressionist exhibition, the critics agreed that she, the only woman in that group of fools, could only be a madwoman, and shortly afterwards, at an auction of her works, someone else blatantly called her a prostitute, so much so that Pissarro felt obliged to punch him. She, on the other hand, does not flinch, misunderstanding has been a habit since the first moments when her unwavering vocation for painting manifested itself. With her petite, frail physique, tormented by headaches and stomach aches, at times so hungry that she could carry nothing to her mouth, Morisot fought a constant battle to paint from an early age against the obstacles her world placed in her way, foremost among them her mother's hostility.

Berthe was born on 14 January 1841 in Bourges, where her respectable family had settled following her father, a prefectural official. Madame Cornélie Morisot is a cultured bourgeois who has precise ideas regarding her three daughters: they must have a good education to become good wives (only much later will a boy be born). So the sisters Yves, Edma and Berthe learn to embroider, play the piano and even paint to acquire the taste of elegant women. But something goes wrong in Cornélie's plans: Berthe has a real talent for painting and wants to become an artist. The first to be alarmed is the teacher who teaches the girls how to hold brushes in their hands: if the girls become painters in a middle-class environment like theirs 'it will be a catastrophe'.

But if Yves and then Edma leave for the wedding veil, Berthe wants no part of it. All the more so when one morning in the winter of 1868, while practising at the Louvre copying the works of the greats of the past, she meets a young man who looks as lively as his genius, Edouard Manet. Manet, too, knows what obstacles to talent are: his Olympia received the most indignant criticism but he, admired by a fervent group of colleagues including Renoir and Monet and by writers such as Baudelaire and Zola, goes on his way, which takes a turn when he meets Berthe. Of course, Manet is already a master and she a debutante but, as Georges Bataille wrote: 'Without Berthe Morisot, in whom he discovered a double charm, the talent of the painter and the beauty of the model (not to mention her capricious intelligence), Manet would perhaps not have done Impressionist painting'.

Between 1870 and 1874, Manet did not stop painting Berthe: if in 1868 she is the somewhat woody girl in the foreground of Le balcon, her singular dark and melancholic beauty triumphs in the series of portraits the painter later dedicates to her, among which the most famous is Berthe with the bouquet of violets.

But Morisot has no intention of limiting herself to modelling. When she poses for him, she thinks about anything other than keeping quiet and being admired: she chats, talks about painting and observes his work. But she does not want to imitate him at all: she immediately has her own way of painting in which shapes and colours are not to copy the world but to interpret it according to a new, very personal sensibility. In the course of her career, the female world will be at the centre of Morisot's work, but with a different physiognomy from that attributed to the male gaze. Berthe's melancholic women express in their body, face and posture something that is more about the enigmas of the soul than seduction and sensuality. For her, the modern world is not locomotives, steam puffing, crowds, but the intimacy of women's lives in their private everyday life. No idealisation, neither that of classicism nor that of eroticism: her women are close to the reality of life and the feeling of it. Many years after her death, the writer Paul Valery noted in her paintings 'a close and almost indissoluble relationship between the artistic ideal and existential intimacy', almost as if all her work were 'a female diary of which colour and drawing are the expressive medium'.

When in 1874 Berthe decided to join the group of painter friends - Monet, Degas, Renoir, among others - who were forming a society of independent artists, deciding to avoid official channels and to exhibit in the studio of her photographer friend Nadar in what would be considered the first Impressionist exhibition, she had to defend herself against Manet's vehement discouragement, who advised her against participating in any way. But she is not only a woman of talent, she is a woman of character and believes in the new painting: she will be present at all the group's exhibitions (except one, because she is pregnant), becoming its grand dame.

Nothing shakes her determination, neither the torments of the body nor the judgements of society. Over the years, the conflict with his mother has deepened, all the more so since she has long refused to marry. Some days she locks herself in her room to read - Madame Bovary or Darwin, readings, she says, hardly suitable for a girl - or to write letters. She has constant physical ailments, but never stops painting. And she has a specific ambition: to sell her paintings. As for marriage, she writes to her confidant sister Edma that she had left painting by getting married: '...men easily believe that they can occupy an entire existence', and then adds: '...a life of work is not interrupted without pain'. She never gave up painting and if, when she was over 30, she accepted marriage, it was perhaps to become a Manet, marrying Eugène, the painter's brother. Perhaps she loved Edouard, perhaps he loved her. So at least the portraits he left of her and her words when the artist died seem to indicate: 'All a past of youth and work have vanished...'. But of this story at the heart of one of the most important pages of modern painting, no one can say anything but inferences. In her final days, Berthe wrote to her sister: 'The sweet hours, the terrible hours remain unchangeable... Better to burn love letters'.