Morisot, Manet and Mallarmé, Part 1

Edouard Manet, Stephane Mallarmé 1876

Mallarmé wrote a typically difficult, but lovely, introduction to the catalogue of Berthe Morisot's work in 1896. She had died the previous March, leaving her daughter Julie, to his educational guidance. He writes about her work "So many clear canvases iridescent, here, exact, impulsive, they can wait with a future smile" and goes on to discuss how little she was known though she balanced life and art, her Salon and her painting, always welcoming, admirable. His language requires a slow pace, and knows his reader would know her all too well, visiting this retrospective of her work.

After she and her sister had shown a keen interest, a passion even, for painting, their surprisingly liberal mother for that time, allowed them to continue studying painting under Corot. Through his guidance she had a painting shown in the 1864 Salon and thereby came to know Manet in 1867, sitting for his next Salon submission Balcony, her mother often accompanying her so that her reputation would not be questioned by being in an artist's studio, alone.

Edouard Manet, Balcony 1868

Le Repos 1870

Berthe Morisot 1869

Manet would produce several more paintings of her, which contributes to the gossip that they were amorous of one another, although she married his brother. She and her sister are known to have burned some of their letters to each other, which fact is used to suggest they were hiding some encounter, and both young ladies admit in letters that they kept to have found Manet attractive, if slightly crazy. Whatever romance may have been there was kept secured from the public, then and now, so we do better to appreciate the friendship between the two artists, their attention to each other's work, than to our own lascivious imaginations.

Berthe Morisot with a Fan 1872

The portrait most often reproduced is the one where she is in mourning. It is often used to represent her though she also did a self-portrait.

Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with Bunch of Violets 1872

Berthe Morisot, Self-Portrait 1885

 She mostly preferred to have her daughter in any self-portraits. These portraits with her daughter provide the warm scenes of domesticity that women of her time were permitted to paint.

This interior landscape is one of the reasons that Morisot can seem banal, pastel in color and emotion. Her paintings show women reading, chasing butterflies, sitting in gardens or on balconies. They avoid city streets and the outside world of the flâneur, the wanderer in mind and heart and spirit. They are content within the safe enclave of the privileges accorded a bourgeois woman, who is nonetheless permitted to paint. She is undeniably an Impressionist, but as the next post will show, Mallarmé was able to appreciate her in full.

Berthe Morisot, Lady at her Toilette 1885