This female artist couldn’t have been more Impressionist if she tried
Berthe Morisot was one of the founder-members of the Impressionist movement, participating in all but one of the Impressionist exhibitions.
Berthe Morisot, Self-portrait, 1885 © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
She was also one of the very few successful nineteenth-century women artists. While the men tended to concentrate on novel depictions of city life, Morisot is known for her attention to contemporary life and the activities of women in private or interior spaces. Her work became a record of these alternative lives. As we find out in Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, it also formed a link between the art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Morisot’s works combine two seemingly opposing qualities. On the one hand she used bold, unapologetic brushstrokes. On the other, her art has been known for its finesse. In this exhibition, the gallery utilises its own collection of eighteenth-century art to full potential, juxtaposing Morisot’s works with those that may have inspired her. There are also several works in which earlier century props turn up – a bed here, a fan there. It’s a fun way to play Spot the Difference.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Young Woman, c.1769. Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Eighteenth century art went rapidly out of fashion, considered on the wrong side of history because of its association with the ancien regime – French royalty and aristocracy – who all had their heads chopped off after the revolution in 1789. The revolutionaries did, however, manage to sell a lot of art before it fell from grace. If you go to the Palace of Versailles, you won’t see many period works of art there. But places such as Nissim de Camondo museum in Paris and the Wallace Collection in London have exceptional examples of art and furniture from the period. The latter has one of the most famous works – The Swing (c. 1767) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard – and it was Fragonard to whom Morisot was most often compared.
By the late nineteenth century tastes shifted and eighteenth-century art was ‘rediscovered’. Large museums like the Louvre began exhibiting it and private collectors became interested in acquiring it. It could not escape the attention of the contemporary artists, including Berthe Morisot.
Berthe Morisot, At the Ball, 1875 © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
This exhibition is a result of recent research into her work and the things that inspired her. Women artists were not admitted to the art academy at the time, so Morisot’s artistic education consisted of a combination of private lessons (funded by her affluent parents) and copying paintings in museums.
The show begins with her commanding self-portrait. Her outfit resembles a military uniform, the flowers on her chest look like order decorations. There is little evidence of her gender: her hair is neatly tucked back and seems to be grey; her eyes are peering straight at the viewer. Bold, haphazard-looking brushstrokes concentrate on her face and then fizzle out towards the edges, where the canvas is left entirely bare. We are left in no doubt this artist means business.
Berthe Morisot: Impressionism and the 18th Century at Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2023
Her depictions of other women were more in tune with those of her male contemporaries. Her first foray into including an eighteenth-century prop is an image of a young woman at a ball holding a highly decorative fan in a coquettish way. Georges de Bellio, a collector of eighteenth-century art, bought this work. It must have been apparent to Morisot that the period was attractive to buyers.
For interior scenes, Morisot placed her models in real-life rooms, rather than a studio set up. In one work a woman is shown seated with her back turned to us, next to a Louis XVI-style bed which was Morisot’s own. This painting provoked one nineteenth-century art critic to make one of many comparisons between Morisot and Fragonard. Dulwich Picture Gallery makes this comparison easy for the visitor by placing its own Fragonard painting next to Morisot’s work. What surprised me was not just the apparent similarity between the artists’ styles, but how very modern Fragonard’s work looks. You will come to see Morisot and Impressionism, but may suddenly see Fragonard in a new light too.
Antoine Watteau, Les Plaisirs du bal, c. 1715-17. Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery.
A more clearly eighteenth-century portrait of Madame de Pompadour attributed to François Boucher (c. 1758) leads us to another set of comparisons. The mistress of King Louis XV reclines leisurely on her divan looking dreamily into the distance with an open book in her hand. The brushstrokes are careful, the details precise. We’re then offered several paintings of women on divans by Morisot. One is a jolly-looking model who seems to be floating on a grey cloud that is in fact her luscious dress. Another is presented face on and close with a nonchalant smile – a woman of a new century, the only nod to the previous one being her dress.
Morisot took inspiration from a wide range of eighteenth-century art, including English painters Romney, Reynolds and Gainsborough. Some examples of their works are being shown at the exhibition alongside Morisot’s ones, while others are just outside in Dulwich’s main collection. What the curators don’t know is whether Morisot visited their collection herself – but she visited London and other parts of England. And her depiction of her sister Edna from the back is very similar to a figure in Antoine Watteau’s Les Plaisirs du Bal(c.1715-17), which is part of the Dulwich collection.
Berthe Morisot: Impressionism and the 18th Century at Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2023
A fashionable Parisian woman in winter attire is another possible result of inspiration taken from work in a London collection. This time from George Romney’s Mrs Mary Robinson (1780-81) in the Wallace Collection. The overall style of the paintings is strikingly different, as is the period-specific attire. But the position of the figure, the use of a muff as an accessory, the size of the work – all lead the curatorial team to believe there was a connection. As Morisot stayed in a house opposite the Wallace Collection and noted her admiration for Romney, the link is very plausible.
The exhibition includes one work by Morisot’s sister Edna. They trained together, but Edna chose the traditional path for a woman at that time. Even those who trained as artists typically gave up their career upon getting married. Berthe Morisot’s husband Eugène was a brother of Edouard Manet, so she remained within the Impressionist circle and continued making and exhibiting her work.
Berthe Morisot: Impressionism and the 18th Century at Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2023
In the last few years of her life, Morisot persisted in depicting models and family inside her house, but there was a noticeable shift. In the last room, another take on a woman on a divan has a subtly different feeling to it: the woman is facing away from the viewer, preoccupied with her own thoughts.
Morisot’s daughter also appears on a divan-like piece of furniture in a striking mix of loss, mourning and adolescence. Dressed in black, Julie is shown looking directly at the viewer with a (typical teenagerly) joyless expression, caressing her dog. It has been a year since her father died and everything around her is a reminder of his passing: the empty chair next to her, the dog – a present from the poet Mallarmé following her father’s death. The portrait is furthermore haunting because her mother, the creator of this painting, died but two years later, leaving Julie an orphan.
The exhibition is spread over just a few rooms, each with its own theme, yet all are linked by Morisot’s engagement with both eighteenth-century culture and her contemporary environment. Careful juxtapositions and detailed explanations help us to discover both periods in a new way.