Close friends and artists on the vanguard in Impressionist Paris, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) were also quite different, both as people and as painters. Where Manet was all charm and wit, open to the world in ways then possible only for a man of his elevated social class, Morisot was admired for her reserve, elegance, and intelligence: the corresponding virtues of a 19th-century bourgeois lady. The pleasures of Manet’s art lie in its graphic power, its dialogue with the old masters, its joyous, outsize ambition. The pleasures of Morisot’s are subtler ones of light and surface, of images that seem to shimmer with the possibility of their own disappearance. Manet was essentially a studio painter, producing pictures he hoped would look dashed off “at the first go” only through extensive revision. By contrast, Morisot was trained almost from the beginning as a plein-air (outdoor) landscape painter, capable of swift, decisive work under changing conditions of weather and light. 

The pairs of paintings explored here appear in Manet & Morisot, the first major exhibition ever dedicated to the two artists’ friendship and artistic exchange, on view at the Legion of Honor October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026.

Manet painted a series of famous portraits of Morisot, and The Balcony (1868–1869) contains the first of them. She is the dark-haired figure leaning on the railing at left. Chaperoned by her mother, Morisot posed over the course of many visits to her friend’s studio alongside Antoine Guillemet (also a painter) and Fanny Claus (a violinist). The resulting scene is enigmatic, revealing little about the relationships between the people depicted. Our experience of looking at them recalls that of peering in at the private lives of strangers: a view of the balcony from the street.

Painted the following summer, Morisot’s picture assumes the opposite vantage point, offering a view of the street from the balcony. Morisot’s sister Edma Pontillon posed as the young woman lost in thought beside a balcony window. On seeing this work in Morisot’s studio, Manet hailed it as a “masterpiece,” and recommended that she show it at the official state-sponsored Salon exhibition in 1870. There, hung high on the wall, it attracted little notice, in sharp contrast to The Balcony, which critics at the Salon of 1869 had ridiculed. Deploring the work’s narrative incoherence, they likened Manet’s broad brushwork to that of a house painter.

Painted during the Exposition Universelle — the World’s Fair — of 1867, Manet’s scene deploys the fairground fantasy of the Champ de Mars as a backdrop for the theater of modern life. Top-hatted gents take in the view. Ladies stroll arm in arm. Here are imperial soldiers, a chic horsewoman, and a little groom walking a dog twice his size. Probably slotted in from individual pencil sketches of the kind Manet made constantly in a pocket notebook on the street, these figures represent various urban “types”: stock characters of the modern city. 

Morisot’s picture shows the very same stretch of Paris, roughly five years after the fair, through the eyes of a dedicated landscape painter — and a bourgeois woman. The urban geography is precisely rendered, with successive bridges marching along the River Seine at left, the empty parade ground of the Champ de Mars stretching out at right, and the horizon punctuated by recognizable domes and towers. In the foreground, two elegant women stand beside a little girl, her back turned, inviting us to share in her sensations of light and air. The scene unfolds at the end of Morisot’s own street in the quiet enclave of Passy, where, unlike in the heart of Paris, upper-middle-class women could stroll unchaperoned.

In a chic ensemble of blue and black, the professional model Victorine Meurent gazes out from Manet’s canvas. The girl beside her turns away, grasping a railing and watching a train steam by. This picture announced Manet’s new style in the early 1870s: a new lightness and brightness, a growing interest in plein-air effects. These were already central features of Morisot’s work. 

This picture belongs to a sequence in which the two artists handed back and forth a single motif: a woman in dark clothing beside a little girl gazing into the background. It began with Morisot, who posed her sister and niece this way in 1871, before Manet took it up in The Railway (1872–1873), painted the following year and shown at the Salon of 1874. Morisot surely saw The Railway in progress at Manet’s studio and on view at the Salon. She painted In a Villa by the Sea (1874) the following summer, posing her sister and niece on the veranda at a beach house. Adopting Manet’s horizontal format, Morisot returned to a motif she had originated herself: a young woman in dark clothing beside a little girl, gazing into the distance, her back turned to the viewer. Here the sight before her is not a city view or passing train but the pale green sea, dotted with sailboats, a few licks of paint apiece.

Surely the most “morisotian” painting in Manet’s oeuvre, Before the Mirror marked an abrupt departure from his earlier work. Half-dressed before a mirror, the model turns her back and tightens her corset, baring her shoulders as she contemplates her own reflection. Brisk strokes of white conjure the pleats and laces of her garments. The same kind of mark-making repeats throughout the background: in the cascade of drapery at right, the patterned wallpaper, the blurred mirror, its bright, beveled edge. As in Morisot’s toilette scene (at right), Manet’s allover handling here creates an effect at once sensuous and chaste. Was it the sight of Morisot’s picture at the 1880 Impressionist exhibition that inspired him to show his own that spring? 

The fifth Impressionist exhibition opened on April 1, 1880. There, Morisot showed her toilette scene. A model sits before a mirror, turning her back to pin or unpin her hair. The reflective surface offers no image of her face or body, avoiding a conventional erotic trope. A side table offers up a still life of glassware, a powder puff, and a flower. The model is half dressed or, perhaps, undressed, but the scene’s poetic indeterminacy has less to do with the subject than with Morisot’s way of painting it. One week after this picture went on view, Manet’s curiously similar one appeared nearby, at a small commercial gallery where Manet mounted a solo exhibition.