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Young Woman Seated on a Sofa
Born in Bourges, Cher, France into a successful bourgeois family who encouraged her and her sister Edma Morisot in their exploration of art, Berthe Morisot demonstrated the possibilities for women in avant-garde art movements at the end of the 19th century. She was born in a family that included one of the most prolific Rococo painters of the ancient regime, Fragonard whose handling of color and expressive, confident brushwork influenced later painters. Despite the fact that as a woman she was not allowed to join official arts institutions, she earned respect in art circles for their talent.
Once Morisot settled on pursuing art, her family did not impede her career. She went to Paris to study and copy works by the old master at the Louvre Museum in the late 1850s under Joseph Guichard. By the age of 20, she met and befriended the important landscape painter of the Barbizon school, Camille Corot, who introduced her to other artists and teachers. She took up plein air techniques and painted small pieces outdoors either as finished works or as studies for larger works completed in a studio. She was acquitted with Edouard Marnet from 1868 and in 1874 she married Eugene Manet, Edouard’s younger brother. She convinced Manet to attempt plein air painting, and drew him into the circle of acquaintances of the painters who became known as the impressionists. However he never considered himself an impressionist or agreed to show with the group.
Her first acceptance in the Salon de Paris came in 1864 with two landscape paintings and she continued to show regularly in the Salon until 1874, the year of the first impression exhibition. Impressionist paintings included relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on the accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience and unusual angles. Though her first submission to the salon in 1864 had been well received, she continued to exhibit there until1873 when she stopped sending work after the 1874 Nader studio exhibition, preferring thenceforth to show with the impressionists. In 1874, she showed four oils, three pastels and two watercolors and her work received a few amiable comments, two years later she showed another thirteen oils. By 1876 the critics had noted the emergence of a distinct impressionist style and her wholehearted embrace of its forms was not well received universally.
As a doctrinaire impressionist as well as a member of the haute bourgeoisie, Morisot painted what she experienced on a daily basis, for instance her daughter Julie Manet became the subject of most of her paintings. Her paintings reflected the 19th century cultural restrictions of her class and gender. She avoided urban and street scenes as well as the nude figure and focused on domestic life and portraits in which she could use family and personal friends as models. Her works include not only landscape, portraits, garden setting and boating scenes, but also subjects portraying the comfort and intimacy of family life and domestic life. her subject were serene, images of mothers and children, young girls, seascapes, and views of town and country though she was the opposite: ambitious, stern and characterized by her husband as having “only the empty shell of her heart.” Her paintings were a brave and hopeful face of happiness that masked the despair and insecurity that haunted her throughout her entire life.
Berthe Morisot was relegated to the category of feminine artists because of their usual subjects matter that included women, children and domestic scenes. As a woman surely in the “haute bourgeoisie” she saw domestic interiors, holiday, sports, other women and children. Without exception, her subject matter shows the equivalent of that of her impressionist colleagues. She experimented with numerous media, including oils, watercolors, pastels and drawings. Although white is the most significant color in most of her paintings, she actually uses a variety of subtle colors, including grays, pastel pinks and pale blues to capture e effect of light and to express form. She uses delicate and feathery backstrokes, applied freely in many directions which give her painting a transparent quality. Despite the peaceful and still atmosphere of this painting, the surface is composed of animated, rapid and sketchy brushstrokes that bring a liveliness and freshness to her work. As is of usual to her, the painting was done in her familiar environment of her homestead of which she was familiar to. It portrayed a picture of a relaxed young lady, most probably at her homestead there is a sense that she is being crude, and painting this beautiful short of shiny, shimmering, probably satin dress, painted with gray and black paint. You can feel her gestures that she is almost frustrated and emotional about this. If you look at the flowers in the back of her, there are jabs of paint. It looks like an abstract expressionist painting, very strong and made messy.
The sentimentality and sweetness that sometimes found in her figure paintings, harkening back at times to Fragonard and the 18th century painters, seemed at odds with all descriptions of her personality, suggesting that she painted peaceful world she sought, not experienced.
In the last decades, several art historians have focused upon Berthe Morisot’s depiction of women within the clearly delineated roles and physical spaces which were accepted for bourgeois women during the nineteenth century. Most of the physical spaces were either associated with upper middle class home. Morisot also painted outdoor scenes, which were places that respectable bourgeoisies frequented or modes of transport, which enclosed women.
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Ocoee Middle School’s Gotta Keep Reading with lyrics and some paintings
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