Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions and was central to the group rather than adjacent to it, despite a century of being treated as Manet’s sister in law first and a painter second.

The handling is the loosest of any of them. Canvases are left partly bare, strokes sit separately without blending, edges dissolve. Contemporaries who called the work unfinished were describing a deliberate method.

Subject matter was limited by what a bourgeois woman could respectably paint: gardens, drawing rooms, her daughter Julie, women dressing. She worked those constraints hard rather than complaining about them. She married Eugène Manet, the painter’s brother, and after her death in 1895 her death certificate listed no profession.