The Feminine Impression

"Poor Mme. Morisot, the public hardly knows her!" wrote Impressionist Camille Pissarro on the day in 1895 that he heard of the death of his good friend Berthe Morisot. Compared with the following of her great contemporaries, Berthe Morisot's public has always been modest but no history of the impressionist movement could now overlook her. The reason was clear last week at Manhattan's Wildenstem gallery, where 69 of her works hung in the largest Morisot exhibition ever held in the U.S.

Like the American Mary Cassatt, who was only four years her junior, Berthe made her mark in a man's world, the just-born world of French impressionism. "Do you realize what this means?" one of her early painting teachers asked her mother when he realized how big a talent Berthe had. "In the upper-class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary. I might almost say, catastrophic." But Mamma Morisot was not afraid f having her daughter turn artist, and her husband, a well-to-do civil servant, was broad-minded enough about the girl to introduce her to Painter Camille Corot. The old artist happily accepted her as a pupil, took her out of the musty Louvre where she had been dutifully copying old masters. "Nature itself is the best teacher," he told her.

An intense young woman with fragile features and piercing green eyes, Berthe passed that lesson on to her good friend Impressionist Edouard Manet, who had never painted outside his studio. Manet in turn liberated her brush, taught her to use rapid, loose strokes rather than to aim for dead exactness. After Manet married, Berthe transferred her affections to his younger brother Eugene, who in time became her husband. Their house on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne became one of Paris' brightest salons. Impressionists Claude Monet and Edgar Degas were members of the circle, and so was a struggling artist named Auguste Renoir.

Unlike the men around her, Berthe Morisot was not much interested in experiment. Though her paintings are bathed in sunlight, they do not attempt to dissect each ray, or aim at capturing the fleeting moment as Monet's do. Berthe painted a world of beaches, picnics, race tracks and canals, of elegant ladies starting off to the theater and of young girls preening before the mirror. She feared that the impressionist obsession with light might be carried too far at the expense of form and harmony. The men who ate at her table sometimes chided her for her lack of adventure, but her nephew by marriage. Poet Paul Valery, understood her better.

"Living on the edge of the Bois," he wrote, "she found it gave her landscape enough: trees, the gleaming lake, and sometimes ice for skaters. She contented herself with nature's Parisian parsimony, taking from it what it gave: the themes for some exquisite works."

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