Lille and Martigny Berthe Morisot

The exhibition of Berthe Morisot's work, which opened at the Palais des Beaux- Arts, Lille, and is now on view at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny (to 19th November), is the first Morisot retrospective to be held in France since 1961 (not the first retrospective anywhere, as the press release claimed), and is accompanied by a substantial catalogue.1 It is fifteen years since the show organised by Mount Holyoke Women's College and shown there and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and there has still been no Morisot show in Great Britain.2 This is surprising on two counts, both because of the plethora of Impressionist exhibitions of every kind, and because of the interest in Morisot as a woman painter. And the current exhibition certainly argues for more frequent opportunities to see the work of this most subtle of artists.

The display opens with a portrait of Morisot by her sister Edma, newly rediscovered and recently shown also in Bilbao at the exhibition held there of women Impressionists. 3 It shows Morisot aged twenty-four, working at her easel with great concentration and intensity, and provides a suitable opening introduction to this frequently surprising painter. Everything in Morisot's upbringing and background argued against her becoming a professional artist, yet her determination and singlemindedness prevailed against the expectation that painting would remain a pastime for her. This portrait conveys something of that drive and focus.

Morisot was Camille Corot's only formal pupil, and the early paintings show that she learned her lessons well. Her copy (cat. no.3; private collection) of Corot's Tivoli. Les jardins de la villa d'Este (Louvre, Paris) suggests how carefully she followed Corot's example, and some lessons about composition and tonality were never forgotten. But Morisot soon found her own way, as a painting such as the delightful Deux seurs sur un canapé (no.7; Fig.65) indicates. The identically dressed young women sit half facing each other, framed by the curved back of the upholstered divan, the pattern of which threatens to overwhelm the delicate blue spotted fabric of their dresses. The Japanese fan in the background links the two figures, and the open fan held by the sister on the right reprises the motif. The painting is free and sketchy, the control of tonality and of the touches of black, for instance the ring on the finger of the left-hand figure, is complete. This is the work of an already accomplished painter, and it is no surprise that the nascent Impressionist group wished to include Morisot among their number.

By the years immediately following the Franco-Prussian war, Morisot's particular 'take' on modernity was firmly established. She painted the world in which she lived and worked, using her sisters and their children, or other members of her family as models, including the one, exceptional, male model, her cousin Marcel Boursier. A wonderful example of her approach included in this show is Sur la terrasse of 1874 (no.20; Fig.66). Painted at the same time as the better-known painting in the Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, it shows Morisot at her most accomplished. Her aunt, Marie Boursier, sits in an elaborate chair, while beyond, the path up the cliffs and the channel view below are indicated with great subtlety - the merging of sky and sea is a tonal distinction worthy of Corot at his pearly best. The painting also indicates one of the reasons why Morisot is still not as well-known as she should be: her paintings simply do not reproduce well, the gradations of tone, the thinly applied paint and the nuancing of the coloured stripes in the dress fail to register in reproductions. This is one of the great themes of Impressionism - the seaside as a site of leisure, and Morisot gives us another way of looking at it, from the point of view of the women who congregated on balconies and terraces rather than parading on the beach.

Another key site of Impressionism, Argenteuil, was explored by Morisot from her family's home on the opposite bank of the Seine, at Gennevilliers. In Paysage a Gennevilliers of 1875 (no.23; private collection), we see the very familiar run of buildings and smoking chimneys of Argenteuil from another perspective, the far more rural surrounds of Gennevilliers, complete with grainstack.

Morisot's marriage to Manet's brother Eugene in 1874, and the birth of their daughter Julie in 1879 introduced two new models to many of the images. In a painting of Eugene made during their visit to the Isle of Wight in 1875 (no.28; Fig.67), Morisot confines him to the interior, gazing out of the window at a girl and a woman, the harbour at Cowes beyond. This inverts the familiar idea that women's place was in the interior, and indeed Eugene's rôle as house husband and, later, child carer, was something of a reversal of the norm for this time. Julie became the focus of much of Morisot's art from her birth until her mother's death in 1895, and the exhibition included both familiar images and others from private and public collections that are much less well known, such as the oil and water-colour views of Julie on the beach at Nice in 1882 (no.61, private collection; no.62, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm).

Morisot's prowess with water-colour is well demonstrated in this exhibition, often accompanied by a few pencil lines that show her facility with a particular kind of drawing, capturing the ephemeral and fleeting (no. 12; Fig.68). Her training, and the complete absence from it of life drawing, meant that her figure studies are sometimes less than successful, as she struggled with anatomy, but her skill at capturing a mood is consummate.

There is a second exhibition within this exhibition, bringing together all of Manet's portraits of Morisot. This is a beautiful small show in its own right, reuniting both the big Salon paintings for which Morisot posed, Le Balcon from Orsay, and Le Repos from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. But it has no place within a Morisot show, especially with its stridently 'masculine' dark red walls contrasted with the light 'feminine' colours of the Morisot rooms. The days when it was necessary to introduce Morisot in relation to Manet, either erroneously as a pupil or in terms that hint at a sexual relationship, are surely long gone. Morisot occupies a position as a key Impressionist painter in her own right. Her exasperation at Manet's temerity in 'correcting' part of her painting of her mother and sister reading would have been increased a hundred-fold at the apparent belief of the curators of this show that her work needed the prop of a 'mini-Manet' exhibition to accompany it. While I would have been delighted to see the Manets separate from the Morisots - perhaps in another gallery - shown in the midst of the latter as they were in Lille they were frankly insulting to Morisot. She was an artist of substance and considerable interest, an artist who grew and changed throughout her career and, while well aware of current developments in the avant-garde Parisian art world, she retained her own integrity and personal qualities of freshness of observation and lightness of touch.

KATHLEEN ADLER

National Gallery, London

1 Berthe Morisot 1841-1895. By Michèle Moyne, Sylvie Patry and Hugues Wilhelm, with essays by Henri Loyrette, Jean-Dominique Rey, Sylvie Patry, Sylvie Patin, Hugues Wilhelm and Hélène Maratray. 487 pp. incl. 220 col. pls.+ 124 b. & w. ills. (Edition de la Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2002), €38. ISBN 2-7118-4303-3.

2 This exhibition was reviewed by the present author in this Magazine, CXXIX [1987], pp.765-66.

3 Mujeres Impresionistas. La otra Mirada. By X. Bray, J. Wilson-Bareau et al. Exh. cat., Museo de Belles Artes, Bilbao [2001], no.6, p.64.