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Berthe Morisot (January 14, 1841 – March 2,
1895) was an impressionist painter.

Born in Bourges, Cher (département)|Cher, France
into a successful bourgeois family who encouraged
her and her sister Edma Morisot in their
exploration of art, she demonstrated the
possibilities for women artists in avant-garde art
movements at the end of the 19th century. Once
Morisot settled on pursuing art, her family did
not impede her career.

By age 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
the studio.

Morisot's first acceptance in the Paris
Salon|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 impressionist exhibition.

She was acquainted with Édouard Manet from 1868,
and in 1874 she married Eugene Manet, Édouard's
younger brother. She convinced Manet to attempt
plein air painting, and drew him into the circle
of acquaintance of the painters who became known
as the impressionists. However, he never
considered himself an impressionist or agreed to
show with the group.



Morisot, along with Camille Pissarro, was one of
only two artists whose work exhibited in all of
the original impressionist shows.

Like Mary Cassatt, during her lifetime, Berthé
Morisot was relegated to the category of
"feminine" artists because of their usual subject
matter — women, children, and domestic
scenes. However, as a doctrinaire impressionist,
Morisot painted what she saw in her immediate,
everyday life. As a woman securely in the "haute
bourgeoisie" she saw domestic interiors, holiday
spots, other women, and children. Without
exception, her subject matter shows the equivalent
of that of her impressionist colleagues. Edgar
Degas, the dandy male bourgeois, painted
rehearsals of the ballet, horse races, and nude
women in apartments (rather than studios). Claude
Monet painted his garden, his children, and his
neighbor's haystacks. Female impressionists
painted their social milieu in a way consistent
with the impressionist approach to subject matter.


Berthé Morisot died in Paris and was interred in
the Cimetière de Passy.

Today, her paintings can sell for more than United
States dollar|$4 million.

==External links==
Commonscat|Berthe Morisot
* http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/morisot/
Berthé Morisot at WebMuseum