On 3 April 1876 Albert Wolff, the irascible and reactionary art critic of Le Figaro, warned his readers about a scandalous new exhibition at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris. A group of artists known as “the Impressionists” were showing what he regarded as some of the most wretched daubs ever painted. The guilty men included Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. “There’s also a woman in the group, as in most notorious gangs,” Wolff added. “She’s called Berthe Morisot. In her case, a feminine grace is maintained amid the outpourings of a delirious mind.” The only girl in the Impressionist gang took the attack in her stride. She had other things to worry about, as she continued to meet the challenge of living up to the nineteenth-century French bourgeois ideal of a wife and mother, while simultaneously pursuing a career as a serious painter.

 

Morisot was a founder-member of Impressionism but most writers on the subject have presented her as a bit of an also-ran. Being a woman has counted against her, albeit in different ways at different times. She was patronised by many of her contemporaries (although not by her fellow-Impressionists) as a petit-maitre whose work might be allowed a certain “feminine grace” but could never exhibit true genius, an exclusively male preserve. Her work faded almost completely from view after her death and even when her reputation was rehabilitated in the 1950s and 1960s, largely owing to the efforts of pioneering feminist art historians, the suspicion lingered that she had benefited from special pleading and had only been rediscovered because she was a woman. All of which may help to explain why, at a time when Impressionist art has been at the zenith of its popularity, there has been no...

To read the full article please either login or register .