This exhibition occurred in the past. This website is available for informational purposes only.

Berthe Morisot

The work of Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), like that of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was generally either praised or reviled during her lifetime for being unfinished, indeterminate, and hurried. Charles Ephrussi, art collector and owner of the periodical La Gazette des beaux-arts, remarked that "She grinds flower petals on her palette, in order to spread them later onto her canvas with airy, witty touches, thrown down a little haphazardly." Morisot's Impressions, like Renoir's, forced the viewer to think less about the represented subjects than about the transformation of them on canvas. The Artist's Daughter Julie, with Her Nanny (The Sewing Lesson) and Interior of a Cottage are gloriously painted drawings in which each line is a color sensation. In the latter, Morisot painted landscape, genre scene, and still life in one composition, linking them all with a series of purposeful painted lines that seem almost to move around the forms rather than to define them. The sheer abandonment of her gesture and its increasingly non-representational role in her paintings put Morisot at the forefront of Impressionist experimentation.