Artists Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) were friends for at least 15 years and closer than anyone else in the Impressionist group. Read on to learn more about their artistic exchange and how it planted the seed for modern art.

1. While Manet never actually joined the Impressionist group, Morisot was a founding member.

Though Manet is often called the father of the Impressionist movement, he never actually joined the group. Morisot did! Ignoring Manet’s advice, she took part in the Impressionists’ first group exhibition in 1874. She was the only woman to show work under her own name in that daring and experimental show. Morisot was among the group’s most faithful members, exhibiting in all but one of the eight official Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886.

2. Manet painted Morisot at least 10 times.

Manet’s paintings of Morisot include some of his most celebrated works — The Balcony (1868–1869), Repose (ca. 1870), and Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872) — but many of them remained in his studio until the end of his life. Just two were presented as gifts to their sitter: Berthe Morisot Reclining, an intimate, bust-length portrait cut down from its original full-length format, was signed, dated, and given to her in 1873. Berthe Morisot with a Fan seems to have been presented as a wedding present when Morisot married Manet’s brother in 1874.

3. Manet and Morisot collected each other’s work.

Manet owned two of Morisot’s landscapes: The Harbor at Lorient (1869) and Hide-and-Seek (1873). She gradually amassed one of the most important collections of his paintings in the world, more than two dozen pictures. Living surrounded by these works allowed Morisot to continue her artistic conversation with Manet even after his death in 1883. Pictures by Manet sometimes appear on the walls in Morisot’s late paintings of her home. In Morisot’s Before the Mirror (1890), his painting Berthe Morisot Reclining is reflected in the mirror. 

4. While Morisot started out as Manet’s model, he later took inspiration from her work.

The story of their friendship has often been told through Manet’s early portraits of Morisot, but new scholarship reveals that, by the final years of his life, Manet increasingly followed Morisot’s example — her choice of subjects and colors, and even her rapid, fluttering brushstrokes.

Manet began to borrow individual motifs and whole compositional ideas directly from Morisot’s work. One example is the image of a little girl with her back turned to the viewer, which appears again and again in Morisot’s pictures — including View of Paris from the Trocadero (ca. 1871–1872), Interior (ca. 1872–1873), and In a Villa by the Sea (1874). Manet borrowed the concept for one of his most famous pictures, The Railway (1872–1873), where the little girl turns her back to observe a passing train, swallowed up by a cloud of steam.

5. Together, they painted the four seasons.

Morisot painted two seasons, Summer (ca. 1878–1880) and Winter (1880), imagined as elegant Parisian ladies: one framed by a rose garden in full bloom, the other bundled up against the cold before a backdrop of bare trees. Manet saw and admired Morisot’s pictures, and soon painted the other two seasons, Spring (1881) and Autumn (1881 or 1882): one, a pert brunette in a flowered dress, the other, a glamorous blonde before a textile of fall-blooming chrysanthemums. Never before seen as a complete series, the four seasons are reunited for the first time in our exhibition.