Berthe  Morisot 

Berthe Morisot

Bourges (Francia), 1841 - Parigi, 1895 

An early talent, Berthe, as a woman, can’t attend the official schools, but she studies at a painter’s who teaches her  true painting, by training her on works exhibited at The Louvre. The next step will be the  en plein air painting, typical of Realism, even though the real turning point will occur for the young painter in 1868, when she meets Èduard Manet, whom she will become a student and model of and  later will marry his brother Eugène. After also meeting Degas e Renoir, she will take part in  an Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, and in all the others, apart from the fourth, the 1879 one, because she was expecting her child Julie.  In the group she will get a fundamental role, she will try to reconcile the tensions and conflicts that gradually will  arise among the artists of the group and, after her marriage, she will transform her house in a cenacle of intellectuals, among them Zola, Mallarmè, Renoir, Daumier, Degas … She will never stop painting, always emerging more and more for the chosen subjects and will lead the way for the other women of the group, Marie Bracquemond, Eva Gonzales e Mary Cassatt. 

Though adhering completely to the new impressionist poetics, Berthe produces a kind of female diary, made up of domestic scenes (the most appropriate for a woman, as it was considered inconvenient to paint in public places) but this is not limiting for her. Her subjects made up of the landscapes of that domestic world she loved, represent a real heart diary for images, portrayed with a personal pictorial touch some critics will define  inachevé, incomplete. Elisabetta Rasy writes about that: “But what is incomplete is the female world inspiring her, or maybe in her own eyes, the same world, as if she found herself at the same distance between vision and reality. A mysterious world where children, Julie in this case, in their dreaming eyes, reflect the secret without being able to unveil it.

Among her works let’s remember: The Reading (1873),(oil on canvas, 46 x 71, 8 cm, Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art) and The Cradle (1872), perhaps the most famous, (oil on canvas, 57 x 47cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay)  1872, in which she portrayed her sister Edma with her daughter Blanche.