The woman who had it all

A rare female presence in an art world dominated by men, Berthe Morisot could have faced solitude or even catastrophe, but rose to become one of France's leading Impressionists, as Caroline Bugler discovers

-  Caroline Bugler

IN 1874, an art exhibition was held at the former Paris studios of the photographer Nadar, which has gone down in the annals of art history. On the deep-red walls hung paintings of dancers, laundresses, bathers, racing, theatre scenes and landscapes. The artists included Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir and Monet, who had banded together to display their avantgarde work because it had been rejected by the Salon, the French Academy's official exhibiting body. The show attracted widespread hostility. Monet's Impression, Sunrise, a misty view of his native Le Havre at dawn, presided over by the orange ball of a rising sun, was picked out for particular ridicule, and inadvertently gave rise to the name of the group. Only one woman took part-Berthe Morisot, who had also helped organise the exhibition. Her art teacher was alarmed to see her in such 'deleterious company', warning her mother that 'one cannot hope to consort with madmen unscathed'. However, the madmen Impressionists regarded Morisot as one of their own and she would go on to take part in seven out of eight of their group shows, with one critic hailing her work as 'impressionism par excellence'.

Where the male Impressionists celebrated the modern public life of Paris and, sometimes, its seedier sides, Morisot's works explore a private, domestic world. You search her paintings in vain for crowd scenes, bustling boulevards, dance halls filled with revellers or the racier pleasures of life in the French capital, because they would have been out of bounds to an unchaperoned, respectable woman such as her. The women wearing splendid ball gowns in her pictures don't dance, but sit alone in some unspecified interior. Her pictures focus on one, two or three figures, most often family members or maids, relaxing at home or in the garden or park, enjoying games, reading, sewing, nursing and minding children.