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Berthe Morisot
Morisot was born in Bourges, Cher, France into a successful bourgeois family who encouraged her and her sister Edna Morisot in their exploration of art and, once Berthe settled on pursuing art seriously, did not impede her career. By the time she was 20, she had met and befriended the important landscape painter of the Barbizon school Camille Corot, who introduced her to other artists and teachers. She took up open-air techniques at about this time; painting small paintings entirely outdoors either as finished works or as studies for slightly larger works completed in the studio. Morisot's first acceptance in the Salon came in 1864 with two landscape paintings, and she continued to show regularly in the Salon until 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition.
She was acquainted with �douard Manet from 1868, and in 1874 she married Eugene Manet, �douard's younger brother. She managed to convince Manet to attempt some open-air painting and drew him into the circle of acquaintance of the painters who became known as the Impressionists. However, he never considered himself an Impressionist or agreed to show with the group. Morisot, on the other hand, was, along with Camille Pissarro, one of only two artists who had work exhibited in all of the original Impressionist shows. Like Mary Cassatt, in her own lifetime, Berthe Morisot was relegated to the category of "feminine" artists because of their usual subject matter; women, children and domestic scenes. However, as a doctrinaire Impressionist, Morisot strove to paint what she saw in her immediate, everyday life. As a woman securely in the haute bourgeoisie she saw domestic interiors, holiday spots, other women and children. Her subject matter is, without exception, the personal equivalent of that of her Impressionist colleagues. Edgar Degas, the dandy male bourgeois, painted rehearsals of the Ballet, horse races, and nude women in apartments rather than in studios. Claude Monet painted his garden, his children and his neighbor's haystacks. The female Impressionists painted their social milieu in a way consistent with the Impressionist approach to subject matter. Berthe Morisot died in Paris and was interred in the Cimeti�re de Passy.
Today, her paintings can sell for more than US$4 million.
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