﻿Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, these names are most commonly associated with
Impressionism, one of the most influential and important modern art movements. However, as you
may expect, these three artists are far from being the only impressionists. Some, I would argue,
were, at times, even more controversial and convention-defying than this trio.
The artist I’ll cover in this video is definitely one of them. The one thing I like the most about
their art is that, sometimes, they’d leave large parts of the canvas completely devoid of paint,
something I absolutely love for reasons I’ll get into later.
They were already successful, even before being linked with the impressionists,
appearing at seven Paris salons and, later, 7 of the 8 impressionist exhibitions.
They’d study under Édouard Manet, pretty controversial himself, who’d they met in 1868.
That same year, Manet would paint them, alongside two other models, in this painting: The Balcony.
However, if you assumed, looking at the Balcony, that the artist I’m talking about is the man
in the centre, you’d be wrong. This video is on the only woman
amongst the 29 artists of the first impressionist exhibition. We’re talking about Berthe Morisot.
Manet would often use Morisot as a model for his paintings and it was often speculated that both
artist had an affair, however, Manet was married, so Morisot married Édouard’s brother,
Eugène Manet. You can see him here in Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight made in 1875,
looking outside of a window. The couple would have a single child, Julie, who’d later become
Morisot’s favourite model. You sometimes see he with her nurse, sometimes with her father,
sometimes daydreaming, or captivated by a book. She can be seen playing the violin,
or mourning her dead father. These scenes follow Julie throughout her life, they depict the serene,
the happy and sometimes, the sad. What attracts me the most to these paintings isn’t necessarily the
subject matter, a girl reading for example, but it’s the idea that Morisot recorded these moments
because her daughter was living them. Perhaps she didn’t really care to paint a girl reading,
but she really wanted to paint her daughter reading and this relationship between the
artist and the subject is incredibly powerful in these paintings and they can’t be overlooked.
My favourite artwork, by far, featuring Julie isn’t even a painting, it’s this drawing. It’s
titled the Drawing Lesson. It shows both Berthe and Julie, heads almost touching,
working on a drawing. Morisot is looking at the viewer, or the mirror, while Julie seems
captivated by the drawing. The admiration she has for her mother’s work is touching. We can almost
imagine her about the raise her eyes towards us to compare her mother’s drawing to their reflection.
However, what I like the most about this artwork, aside from the heart-warming mother-daughter
relationship it depicts, is the fact that we, as viewers, are playing Julie’s role. We
are examining the drawing the same way she is, we are seeing what she is seeing. It’s almost as if,
if we turned to our right, Morisot would be drawing next to us. The emotional connection
between the two subjects and the fact that the viewing experience of this artwork is similar to
the experience of these subjects makes the artwork immersive. It’s a drawing, there’s no colour,
there’s no detail, but you still feel pulled into the work if only by the simple fact that,
the obscured drawing this little girl is looking is being looked at by you, over a century later.
However, Morisot’s art wasn’t only exceptional because of the emotional connection she had with
her subjects, or because of various “feminine” characteristics many critics would associate
to her art, but also because of some pretty radical techniques she applied to her works
or didn’t apply to her works. See, sometimes, she didn’t bother to cover parts of the canvas, she
left canvas exposed, completely assuming the fact that the image she was making was a fabrication.
If academic painters camouflaged their brushstrokes to hide the trace of the artist,
Morisot was proudly showing that there is, in fact, an artist behind this work and the contrast
between the empty canvas and the subject most effectively shows this. There are many examples
of this, many of which are my favourite works by Morisot. Young Girl with A Vase, made in 1889,
was exhibited as a finished artwork. This is not an unfinished painting. What I love about this
type of work is the contrast between the detailed and the sketched, between the full and the empty,
between presence and absence. And this contrast forces the viewer to focus on the subject,
our eye can’t wonder around the composition and, if it does, it’s only for a brief second...
there isn’t much look at. Every single painting using this technique creates a kind of blurriness
around the subject, giving us no other choice than to concentrate our attention to it.
Manet would write, in a letter to Fantin-Latour, that it was regrettable that Morisot wasn’t a man.
Berthe Morisot has definitely lacked the recognition she deserved and it’s undoubtedly
because she’s a woman. We know Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas and I’m certain that, one day,
Morisot will be among those names. There’s a growing effort to correct the oversights of
the past and reestablishing Berthe Morisot as one of the pioneers of impressionism is
part of these efforts. I’m going to end this video on a quote by Morisot:
“I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal
and that's all I would have asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they.”