Emily

Art historians have most often considered the relationship between Manet and Morisot as model and muse, as opposed to colleague, friend, collaborator.

Kim

This is all too familiar when you have the dynamic of an older male artist and a younger female artist. He is the leader. She is the follower. He’s the teacher. She’s the student. In reality, when you start looking at the art, it’s not this one-way trajectory. It’s actually much more of a dialogue.

Emily

We’d see him borrowing compositional motifs, borrowing subject matter, borrowing even her breathless, fluttering brushwork. And there are some works painted near the end of his life in which we begin to feel that he is doing his best impersonation of Morisot. It feels very surprising that there has never before been an exhibition that’s explored this vital relationship, which really does help us understand the evolution of Impressionism itself.

Emily

Édouard Manet is often called the father of modern painting. Over the course of the 1860s, Manet had made his name, for better or for worse, with a series of somewhat scandalous pictures. Even those who found his painting scandalous found him a sort of creature of bottomless charm. Morisot possesses the kind of corresponding virtues of the correct bourgeois lady.

Emily

She trained originally as a landscape painter, and so she had a tremendous capacity to work quickly and decisively, which will become an invaluable part of her practice.

Emily

Manet and Morisot likely crossed paths as early as 1865. Their first meeting happens in the galleries of the Louvre, perhaps before the Medici cycle of Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish master, who represents a kind of painterly tradition that they clearly both admire very much.

Kim

He came into that relationship already as this towering figure, whereas she was a relative novice.

Emily

Manet paints her for the first time in 1868 to 1869, a Salon picture known as The Balcony, in which she poses, a dark-haired, brooding lady. Posing for Manet is an audacious thing for a woman of her social class to do. But by lending her likeness to his paintings, she’s showing how important she sees this work. Morisot paints Young Woman at Her Window the summer after she poses for The Balcony.

Emily

It belongs to what seems to be a new campaign of figure painting. The sort of neat trick that this painting seems to perform is really to reverse the perspective. So whereas The Balcony gives us a view of the balcony as if from the street, Young Woman at Her Window gives us a view from the balcony. A crucially important picture for this story, which is really the only canvas that we know the two of them both touched, is a double portrait of her sister Edma and her mother that belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it was given as an immovable, permanent gift.

Kim

The Mother and Sister of the Artist is one of the most complicated and deeply problematic paintings of her career. When she is painting this work, she shows it to an artist friend, and he wasn’t as enthusiastic as she had thought he might be.

Emily

And this throws her into a little bit of a panic about whether this painting is going to be ready for Salon submission. She tells Manet this, and he says, “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ve got you. I will stop by, and have a look, and tell you what to do.”

Kim

And so he takes her brush and her palette, and he starts tweaking the skirt, and then he goes up to the bust, and to the head, and to the background. And suddenly, over the course of four hours, he repaints the artist’s mother completely. And Morisot is mortified. She’s horrified. The painting has to be submitted to the Salon.

Kim

The cart is there waiting for her submissions.

Emily

She’s too mortified to say anything. And so off it goes. Though she tells her mother afterwards that she would rather be at the bottom of the Seine than see this picture on view.

Kim

I think she learned tremendously from that, and it was a pivotal moment for her to, sort of, become a little more assertive and more confident in her art.

Emily

As time goes on, and as she carves her own path, we start to see him take a kind of interest in what she’s up to over there. Morisot and Manet begin to hand a compositional idea back and forth. It seems to have begun with Morisot. The concept is an adult woman beside a little girl who turns her back to us, holds onto a railing, and looks off into the distance.

Emily

Manet would surely have seen this picture in progress, and within a year, he has embarked on his own, very much larger, more ambitious treatment in The Railway. He poses his model beside a little girl who, again, turns her back, holds onto a railing, and gazes into the distance. And then the following summer, she returns to the motif a final time. Comparing the technique of Manet’s big, ambitious, carefully worked and reworked exhibition picture with the amazing, kind of, plein air swiftness and breeziness of Morisot’s picture tells us a great deal about their different confidence, frankly, in their handling of paint.

Kim

Manet’s work doesn’t look overwrought, but oftentimes is. Once you start looking, you can see how heavily worked things are. Morisot isn’t like that. Her work is actually very fluid, very dynamic. There’s a lot more confidence.

Emily

1874 was a particularly tough year for the Salon jury, with a lot of rejections, and we know that all of Morisot’s submissions were rejected.

Kim

I think she understood that, for her, the Salon was a dead end. I think she saw this as an opportunity to maybe, sort of, change her fate.

Emily

So the Impressionists are a group of French painters who band together to exhibit independently outside of the official state-sponsored Salon exhibition.

Kim

These young artists have been talking for years about establishing an independent exhibition.

Emily

The group includes Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro.

Kim

Edgar Degas was a very avid recruiter, and he’s the one who invited Berthe Morisot to join.

Emily

When she receives this invitation, she takes the bold step and accepts. We know that she does this in defiance of the advice of Manet.

Kim

Berthe Morisot participated in seven out of eight Impressionist shows, more than Monet, or Renoir, or Cézanne. She was a powerful and significant presence within the Impressionist circle.

Emily

Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets might be the single most beautiful picture Manet ever painted. It seems to have been carried out with unusual speed for Manet, and indeed, Morisot told her daughter, Julie, that he had painted it in just one or two sittings over the course of just a few hours. The bouquet of violets, of course, had various different meanings, but most of them were to do in one way or another with courtship.

Emily

And Morisot told her daughter that as she sat in that drawing room and posed for this picture, Manet tried to persuade her to marry his brother, Eugène, who, of course, she will ultimately marry in 1874, and who will be the father of Julie Manet. It is such an amazingly intense and, in a way, kind of sensuous portrait that really almost evokes self-portraiture.

Emily

We almost feel as though Manet is looking in a mirror and looking at Morisot. There is a melding of sitter and artist. And it does, I think, speak to the very particular intimacy these two artists shared. In 1880, Morisot makes an array of works that includes Young Woman at Her Toilette, which receives lavish praise from contemporary critics for its perfumed quality, somehow.

Emily

There’s something intangible and magical about it. The week after that Impressionist show opens, Manet puts his version of exactly the same subject on view, about 15-minutes walk away at a solo show. Before the Mirror is probably the single most “morisotian” picture Manet ever painted. It’s executed with a kind of speed and finesse that we really associate more with her, but it also shares this, kind of, light, bright palette.

Emily

In the spring of 1880, at the fifth Impressionist exhibition, Morisot shows two pictures of elegant Parisians as seasons of the year. One she calls Summer, and another she calls Winter. We know that Manet saw these pictures. And really, within about a year, he has started work on his own seasonal subject. It depicts a budding actress before springtime flowers. And he paints, apparently as a sort of pendant to it,

Emily

another seasonal subject, Autumn. And to me, it’s very interesting that these two are the two seasons that Morisot had not painted. So clearly, Manet has completed this project initiated by his sister-in-law.

Emily

Manet shows signs of pretty serious illness in the late 1870s. The family rented a house outside of Paris in really the final summer of Manet’s life. Manet does seem to have been quite a devoted uncle. There’s a very sweet, unfinished likeness of Julie perched on a watering can. We’re fortunate in the exhibition to be able to pair it with a picture of Julie with a watering can painted by her mother that same summer.

Emily

And whereas Morisot’s picture gives us a sense, actually, of the game that Julie is playing. Manet really uses the watering can more as a piece of furniture, and she’s sort of posing properly for him, which again, I think speaks to their divergent strengths as artists, their divergent interests as artists, as well.

Kim

All too often, we have this idea of the solitary genius, their name up in lights. The marquee artist: Manet. Monet. Renoir. I think that gives us a distorted view of how artists really work. These artists weren’t working in isolation. They never were.

Emily

The relationship between Manet and Morisot really is the single closest relationship between any two members of the broader Impressionist circle. Each of these two artists profoundly influenced the other. And each of them was, in turn, a profoundly influential figure for generations of artists. So there’s no question that the kind of alchemy of this relationship had a determining effect on the subsequent course of art history.