Visiting the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris is always a pleasure, no matter how many times one may have visited the museum. Works by Claude Monet are placed on permanent display along the high walls of the entire underground portion of this sumptuous three-floor building, with the most legendary of these artworks being Impression, Sunrise — no doubt celebrated for its own magic, but even more so for lending its name to the Impressionism art movement.

The main floor is reserved for the ever-changing exhibitions that take place twice or thrice every year. Presently, it is housing a permanent collection of some 20 paintings by a 19th century female artist named Berthe Morisot.

Born in 1841 in the French city of Bourges, in a well-to-do family that later moved to Paris while she was still very young, Morisot developed a passion for painting and impressed many famous artists of the era. These included Henri Fantin-Latour and Jean-Baptiste Corot, whose advice would play an important role in Morisot developing her own style.

But the most influential artistic encounter for her was one with Edouard Manet, one of the main figures of the Impressionist movement, who would become her principal adviser. She would later get married to Eugene Manet, also a painter, but one who never became as famous as his older brother Edouard Manet. Morisot, however, kept signing her artworks with her own family name.

A museum in Paris brings back into the limelight the Impressionistic works by a forgotten female painter

In 1875, Morisot was invited to participate in one of the most celebrated art exhibitions of the era that used to take place every year on an island on the English side of the Channel. The couple attended the event for seven successive years, with Morisot’s works being greatly admired and bought by art enthusiasts of the era.

In the words of William S. Holloway, a British art critic of the age: “Though at the first sight figures generally appear rather vague in Morisot’s paintings, life just the same animates them while you keep looking at them for a while. She has discovered her own peculiar way to capture the shimmer and glow on her objects, not to ignore the air and the light that envelop them… with pink, pale green and vaguely golden rays singing in an inexpressible, harmonious music. No one represents Impressionism with a more refined taste and greater confidence than Berthe Morisot.”

She lived a relatively short life, dying in 1895 at the age of 54. In her own words: “Transferring images to a canvas with time rapidly passing by… a smile on a face, a sparkling flower, a bunch of ripening fruits, a swinging tree branch... what a marvelous adventure painting is!”

Morisot was almost forgotten during the last century and her works, many of them part of private collections, never acquired the celebrity of the chefs d’oeuvres by other leaders of Impressionism displayed in museums around the world.

This exhibition, devoted exclusively to the artistic creations of Morisot, displays more than 80 works that have been brought together from many European and American museums and private collections, alongside the modest permanent assortment at the Marmottan museum. What a delight!g

‘Berthe Morisot and the Art of the 18th Century’ is on display at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris from October 18, 2023-March 3, 2024

The writer is an art critic based in Paris.
He can be reached at zafmasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 28th, 2024