“What a shame they are not men,” Édouard Manet wrote of Berthe and Edma Morisot, upon meeting the gifted young artists in 1868. Their paintings were, he feared, almost certain to be ignored by the male establishment. It is true that Edma gave up art soon afterwards, marrying a naval officer and moving to Brittany. But Berthe Morisot (1841-95) continued to paint right up to her early death of pneumonia, exhibiting annually at the Paris Salon and making the most singular and radical images of contemporary women, some of them in the act of painting too. Even so, Manet’s prediction would carry a terrible truth.
The Morisot sisters were born to an upper middle-class family who nurtured their aspirations with a private studio and a supply of famous tutors. Corot taught them to paint outdoors in the landscape, an exceptional liberty for stifled Parisiennes. Renoir and Baudelaire became friends, and Berthe Morisot sat for Manet on at least 11 occasions. His paintings are so struck with her dark-eyed intelligence – she is the startling woman leaning on the railing of his 1868 work The Balcony – that historians have wondered about their relationship, their letters and intense conversations. But Morisot never painted Manet.
