Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot: The Passion of Art

From the high, classical, and conventional society of 19th-century France emerged two great painters with their own approach, sensibility, and uniqueness, Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. From the moment they met inLouvre, in 1868, maintained a connection throughout their lives, at first close and frequent and then looser and different in nature but always close to each other in their hearts.

For fifteen years, from the moment they met, Edouard and Berta saw each other regularly and cultivated a special relationship that was spiced with attraction, friendship and competition. But most of all, the two were united by the passion with which they devoted themselves to their life's calling, painting, against all the obstacles that stood in their way. Their difficulties were different and similar, their fates were also different and similar.

In French, the word painter has no feminine form. To say “I am a painter” – that was the challenge facing Berthe Morisot, a well-to-do girl from a well-established bourgeois family, in the mid-19th century. In those days, the destiny of an upper-class girl was to marry, have children, properly run a fine household, and paint, if she so desired, only marginally, as an amateur.

Berthe became the first female painter in the Impressionist group, alongside Monet, Degas, and Renoir, to be seen as their equal, in every way. Berthe’s fellow painters, including Edouard, recognized her talent and learned from her in the field just as she herself learned from them. Art critics, however, treated her with disdain and saw her as a “house painter,” a woman who painted only female subjects, for a temporary amusement that she would soon tire of and stop.

Edouard Manet, as for him, suffered criticism, ridicule, and slander during his scandalous life, because he dared to innovate painting, turn his back on the rules of the academy, and turn toward realistic avenues that were not understood at that time, and were considered “coarse and vulgar,” as critics wrote at the time.

Edouard Manet cannot distinguish between a human face and a pair of slippers.

Edouard Manet does not distinguish between a painter and his paints.

Entire families flocked to exhibitions to linger over his paintings and laugh. Today, paintings by Manet and Morisot sell for millions of dollars…

Like Berthe, Edouard was from an upper-middle-class family and the two could not help but meet. Manet's father was a high-ranking government official and his mother received everyone of note at her salon. Berthe's father was also a high-ranking government official and her mother also hosted dinners in their living room and entertained the same social circle.

For fifteen years, Bertha and Edouard cultivated a relationship that remained largely mysterious. In the end, Bertha married Edouard's brother. Was there a stormy secret love between Bertha and Edouard, besides brotherhood and competition? It is not known. In any case, it can be assumed that their love was purely platonic.

The relationship between Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot

Meeting, half a meeting

Berthe and Édouard crossed paths on a winter day in 1868, at a Rubens painting in the Marie de Medicis Gallery of the Louvre Museum, when their mutual friend, the painter Henri Pantin-Latour, introduced them. Berthe Morisot and her beloved sister Edma diligently copied Rubens's paintings. Copying masterpieces was a necessary step in the path of every apprentice at that time.

The parents of both sisters enrolled them in a painting class. In 1868, Bertha, along with her sister, was a young and unknown student in the painting class while Édouard Manet, a decade older than her, was already a well-known painter. Five years earlier, he had caused a scandal when he exhibited “Olympia” and “Breakfast on the Grass.”

The writer and art critic Théophile Gautier, who supported Manet in his early steps, recoiled from his radical development that trampled on decent tradition. “Manet’s messiah has the honor of being a danger,” he said. And Manet did draw fire.

The young Berthe Morisot, who dreamed of becoming a painter, was attracted to the experienced, scandalous, and self-confident painter. Berthe Morisot maintained an extensive correspondence with her family and friends, and her letters constitute a rich source of information.

She documented her first meeting with Edouard in detail, with gentle humor and talent. The smile of the seductive dandy, whose blond beard was carefully trimmed, met the smile of the shy student, who was busy, before he arrived, copying the faces of the three sensual women in Rubens' painting, "Marie de Medici Disembarking from the Ship in the Port of Marseille."

The modest girl listened, embarrassed and distracted, to the advice of the painter whose name preceded her as a womanizer. What did he think of me, she wondered. Am I naive and seductive, or perhaps charming, like all the women around him? “A woman painter, how rare. We should meet,” the painter concluded, and walked away with his quick, energetic stride.

In a famous letter he wrote to his friend the painter Pantin-Latour, Edouard expresses a condescending attitude toward the women he had just met:

The Morisot sisters are charming. It is a great pity that they are not men. However, they could serve the interests of painting if they married members of the Academy and sowed unrest among these senile camp.

In the months following the meeting at the Louvre, according to Berthe's testimony, Edouard regularly attended the dinners her mother had organized, every Tuesday, at their home on Rue Franklin, in16th DistrictBert and her family were invited to dinner every Thursday at the Manet family's house on St. Petersburg Street, in8th District.

Intellectuals and artists, Emile Zola, Henri Pantin-Latour, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Pauve de Chabannes, Alfred Stevens, passionately debated matters of global concern. After dinner, Edouard's wife, Suzanne, sat down at the piano and played with great skill for the enjoyment of those around her.

Suzanne, a plump, soft, and peaceful Dutchwoman who looked as if she had stepped out of a Rubens painting, first came to the Manet household as a piano teacher to Édouard and his brother Eugène. Suzanne gave birth to a son, Léon, whose biological origins are shrouded in mystery. Was he Édouard's son? The son of Édouard's father? In any case, when the boy was 11, Édouard married Suzanne.

Susan adored her husband and treated his many affairs with forgiveness and without a trace of jealousy. As for the seductive husband, his faithful wife served as a safe haven in his turbulent world. Edouard treated Susan's son, Leon, with warmth and kindness and regularly painted the stages of his development. In the famous painting “The Balcony,” the boy’s profile can be seen.

Bart in Edouard's studio

“The Balcony”: This was the painting that opened the fruitful collaboration between Edouard and Berthe as painter and model. Berthe Morisot cannot yet contribute to Edouard Manet in the field of painting itself, she has nothing yet to teach him, but her beauty and delicate charm work, making him fall in love with her.

“Femme fatale,” they say of her, a definition that is very flattering for the humble girl. Edouard needs a new model who will embody the modernity of a new era. Berthe is perfect for the role. Edouard offers her to serve as his model for the picture that is making his head spin, “The Balcony.”

Thus, from 1868 to 1874, Edouard would paint Berthe in a series of spectacular and unique pictures, each of which would be different and would be a source of inspiration for him as she herself was in them. Berthe Morisot lying on a sofa, Berthe Morisot in pink shoes, Berthe Morisot with a fan, Berthe Morisot in a black muslin dress, Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets, Berthe Morisot wearing a mourning hat after the death of her father.

Edouard dedicated fourteen portraits, more than to any other model, to Berthe, who spent long hours in front of the painter's gaze and brushes. Berthe, she said, loved to spend time with Edouard, in the studio on Saint-Petersburg Street, where the smells of paint and tobacco mingled with the perfumed bodies of the courtesans, the models Edouard painted before her.

Bert immediately recognized the extraordinary painter's immense talent and knew that one day she would also recognize him. France All of her as an important painter in the history of her art. Edouard also recognized the potential inherent in Berthe and helped her discover and fulfill it.

But in the meantime, Charles Garnier, architect of theopera, the painting “Rest” as an ugly and barbaric gibberish and Berthe Morisot, the model, as a melancholy, thin and sickly girl. Berthe did not understand the young architect’s aggression towards her and naturally doubted, to put it mildly, his ability to judge in the field of painting.

The meeting with Edouard was a golden opportunity for Barthes to get to know the maestro. Did Edouard try to lure Barthes into his net? Did the admirer of his talent surrender to him? In the letter that Edouard wrote to Barthes, he declares his feelings for the “beautiful painter,” expresses his longing for her, and on every street in Paris, he longs to see her shoes decorated with rose loops, so familiar to him, and how beautifully they spent time together in the city of Pecan inNormandyHow he would like to see her again.

Letters from Berthe to Edouard do not exist. Experts express astonishment at the absence of letters to Edouard in Berthe's extensive correspondence, which she used to write regularly and frequently to her acquaintances, and raise the theory that Berthe took pains to destroy any evidence of her romantic relationship with Edouard.

At the end of her life, Barth told her friend, the painter Rosalie Risner, that love letters must be burned. We do not need physical remains to record the hours we have experienced, terrible or pleasant, she said. It should be noted that Barth destroyed most of her early paintings because she could not stand their lack of originality.

The young painter was still under the influence of her teachers. In her opinion, these paintings were not worthy of being shown to the public. Barth's ideal of painting was the perception of the fleeting and momentary and its fixation in an optimal and unique way. It is perhaps possible, therefore, to tap from the realm of painting into the personal realm and conclude that certain letters were also inappropriate in her opinion.

However, it should be noted and emphasized that these theories have no proof. Did Berthe hide letters she wrote to Édouard? Maybe so, maybe not. Did Berthe and Édouard have opportunities to be alone? Most likely not. In any case, the connection between Édouard and Berthe was deep and significant, both personally and artistically. Édouard painted Berthe in fourteen pictures and to no other model, not even Victorine Meran, the model, among others, of “Olympia” and of the woman sitting in “Breakfast on the Grass,” did he pay so much attention.

Many critics see the way Edouard painted Barthes as evidence of his attraction to her, an attraction that found unique and intense expression in the painting because he did not satisfy her, as he did with many other models. On the other hand, Barthes herself, who was not a professional model, but a girl of high status, willingly agreed to spend many hours in Edouard's studio, in tedious poses, obeying his instructions, her left leg should be half-folded under the white dress, the fan held this way and that, don't move, smile, please.

Bertha Morisot with a bouquet of violets

The most famous and characteristic image of the special love story between the two painters is “Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets.” In the language of flowers, the violet has been, since the Celts and Greeks, a symbol of innocence, modesty, depth of feelings, and secrecy. It is no wonder, then, that Edouard painted Berthe with a bouquet of violets, almost invisible, stuck in a keyhole. Berthe considered this picture a masterpiece.

And the story continues. After Edouard finished the picture, he painted another small picture showing the bouquet of violets, a closed red fan (the one that appears in several of her portraits he painted), and a letter that reads: “To Mademoiselle Morisot, from Edouard Manet.” A gift to the esteemed model to express feelings of gratitude, and perhaps even to the desirable woman to express feelings of secret love that Edouard was careful not to reveal to those around him.

Bertha and Edouard occasionally gave each other paintings they had painted, as a gesture of friendship and appreciation. The painting “Bertha Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets” was purchased by Bertha, Tevin and Tequilin after Edouard’s death, which caused her deep sorrow until the day of her own death, twelve years later.

The year 1874 in the life of Bertha

1874 is an important year in Berthe Morisot's life, both personally and in terms of her artistic career. At the age of thirty-three, Berthe finally decides to marry her suitor, Eugène Manet, Edouard's brother. Some say that, unable to fulfill her love for Edouard, she, with no other choice, betrothed her to his brother, Eugène.

In a letter to her dear sister, Edma, Barth talks about false fantasies that she had been deluded by for a long time and that did not make her happy. The time has come to take a new, positive step and respond to the advances of Eugene, a good guy who is so interested in her.

Even if Barthes married Eugène out of logical calculations and not out of burning love, the exchange transaction, assuming it took place, was extremely successful. Eugène was not a brilliant painter like his brother, but instead of a hopeless womanizer, Barthes gained a loyal friend who placed himself at the service of her art.

Eugène proved to be a suitable husband and Berthe was happy until death took him from her in 1892 when he was only 58 years old. In December 1874, Berthe lost her father and in January the following year she married Lajeune in mourning. This was also the year in which Édouard painted her for the last time, “Berthe Morisot with a Fan”, a portrait in which Berthe appears rarely in profile, with her engagement ring to Lajeune on her finger, as if the painter wanted to capture this moment of the end of an era in their relationship.

From the moment Eugène married the chosen one of his heart, he completely abandoned the painting he had pursued as a hobby and devoted himself to his wife, an unusual behavior at that time. The roles were reversed. Eugène loyally supported his wife's career, served as her agent and relieved her of all practical, administrative and organizational hassles. Money and property were at the disposal of the couple, whose livelihood concerns were left to him, so that the conditions for Berthe's artistic flourishing were optimal.

1874 was also the year in which Barthes turned her back on tradition and demonstrated a bold independence, choosing to paint outside of all influence and above all outside of that of her sister-in-law. In this fateful year, Barthes stopped exhibiting her pictures at the official Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts after ten years of loyalty and joined, against Edouard's advice, her friends who would soon be called the "Impressionists."

From this year onwards, Barthes began to fly on her own. This was the year in which the group first exhibited in its own independent salon, and Barthes was the only woman to appear there. Twenty of Barthes' paintings were hung in the first Impressionist salon, which Edouard Manet flatly refused to participate in.

Edouard did not believe in the strategy of Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Morisot. He tried with all his might to dissuade Berthe from exhibiting at the Salon, but she staunchly defended her choice, with the support of her husband, Eugène.

Establishment, tradition, temperament

Édouard Manet could not deny what his artistic temperament dictated and did not adapt his paintings to the rules of the Academy. However, in his conduct towards the establishment and critics, Édouard was not a rebel. Édouard pursued signs of honor and fame throughout his life and strove to please the authorities and be close to them.

Edouard's father intended his son for a career as a judge, but when he saw his paintings, he realized that it was better to allow him to become an artist. Edouard did not follow the official path and did not study at the School of Fine Arts, but joined as an apprentice the studio of Thomas Couture, who was a painter close to the authorities, respected, accepted and appreciated.

Edouard would not agree under any circumstances to join the Impressionists, who were eager to boast about him and crown him their leader. Manet was about a decade older than the Impressionists and was considered by them to be the father of modernism, a standard-bearer, someone who had paved the way for them.

Manet was ahead of everyone else when he went to confront the judges of the official salon. But the arrows of sarcasm and hysteria against him gradually diminished, the critics and the public began to understand. Soon he would be accepted by the authorities, the critics, the public. Why then take a risk and lose everything when the longed-for success he had pursued his whole life was within reach.

Yet behind the scenes, Manet continued to support the Impressionists, buying their pictures, lending money to Monet and Renoir, writing to journalists praising them and asking them for sympathetic reviews of his friends. Support them now, he wrote, one day you will understand.

Manet knew that the Impressionists embodied a new and legitimate ideal, although they did not necessarily share the same aesthetic options. He was later influenced by them as they were by him, and in some of his paintings a direct influence of Berthe Morisot can be detected.

Berthe Morisot desperately wanted recognition in her lifetime, making efforts to exhibit and sell, but she joined the Impressionists without hesitation. The time did not recognize her unique talent and categorized her as an amateur domestic painter.

The Impressionists were famously defined as madmen, pretentiously and arrogantly presenting unfinished paintings, drawn in haste, and Barth was included in this definition. “Among these madmen there is also one woman,” the critics commented. Even after the Impressionists’ talent was recognized, Barth continued to be disadvantaged by virtue of being a woman.

It would be a long time before she would no longer be categorized as a house painter. Bertha did not attend the School of Fine Arts because the official institution was, absurd as it may seem today, closed to women at that time. Bertha and Edma's parents encouraged their daughters' talent for drawing in their youth and enrolled them in workshops, first with Joseph Guichard and then with Camille Corot when Bertha expressed a desire to paint outdoors, in nature.

Corot trained them to paint landscapes, and in the summer of 1861 the parents even rented a house in the village of Ville d'Avoire near Paris so that the girls could paint near Morin. But when they arrived at Frecken, the pressure on them to marry and start a family was heavy.

Painting became marginal in the eyes of her parents, and the main thing was to fulfill the feminine destiny as it was then perceived by the circle to which they belonged. Edma quickly gave in, married a naval officer, and followed him to live in Lorient, a port city inBrittany, left painting forever.

Bertha remained single until she was over thirty and never even considered giving up her dream, her passion, her life's purpose. Bertha was not a clear rebel, like George Sand, for example, but she was independent and determined, did not sacrifice painting and did not follow exactly the bourgeois path that was destined for her.

Berthe knew how to create a clever synthesis in which she combined painting, marriage, and motherhood. Berthe lived to paint and when the time came, she married a husband who supported her life's ideal. When her daughter was born, the new love also took its place in the harmonious treatise.

Bertha found her way and was happy but at the same time tormented. In fits of rage in her youth she destroyed paintings that she did not think were good enough to be seen. Painting for Bertha was a way of life and the conquest of her own ideal, and no one could stop her from doing so.

She zealously maintained her independence, and the letter in which she describes the day when Edouard came to her house and “corrected” a painting of hers, a portrait of her mother and sister, which she was about to send to the salon, is particularly well-known. Berthe experienced Edouard’s intervention, who snatched her brush from her and transformed Morisot’s portrait of her mother into Manet’s, with constant joking, as a dramatic humiliation. The painting, which in her eyes had become a caricature, was displayed in the salon against her will.

Bert, Julie and Edouard

In 1878, Bert gave birth to a daughter, Julie, who was another source of joy for her mother. The baby, the girl, and the young woman grew up under Bert's brush and appear in over seventy pictures she painted. The beloved daughter was Bert's treasure, who discovered motherhood at a relatively late age.

Julie's appearance in Bert's life opened new doors for her art, which became more mature and personal. In the last years of her life, the outlines of Bert's paintings became more and more blurred, becoming more and more original. Until Bert's death from pneumonia at the age of fifty-four, when her daughter was only seventeen, mother and daughter were inseparable.

After Berthe's marriage, her visits to Edouard's studio ceased and the two painters saw each other much less. However, the artistic and emotional dialogue between them never ceased. In the painting “Julie Playing the Violin,” one of Edouard's portraits of Berthe, painted twenty years earlier, is seen hanging on the wall.

In the summer of 1882, the syphilis that Édouard had suffered from in his youth in Brazil reached its final stage and the painter could no longer walk or stand. Édouard rented a summer house in Roi. Bert and Jeanne also rented a house nearby, in Boujibel, and came every day to visit the patient.

Julie played in the large garden and Edouard painted her in a blue dress. Edouard looks tenderly at his niece, the daughter of the woman he loved with an impossible love, who became his sister-in-law. He had already painted Julie as a baby in 1879 and now, in the last summer of his life, as a child. Berta answers him with a twin painting, reflecting the closeness of the two painters.

The death of Edouard

Edouard's leg became gangrenous and his doctor decided to amputate it. Edouard died in April 1883 after a week of excruciating pain. Bertha and Jeanne visited him every day. “Edouard would have painted the funeral,” Bertha wrote in a letter describing the final tributes paid by family and friends, mostly painters and artists, to the man she loved so much.

Berthe recalls with nostalgia the fifteen years she spent in Edouard’s studio. “I loved this man,” she wrote. “Those hours of cheerful closeness, under his mischievous gaze, when he told me everything that was on his mind, our shared laughter.” Berthe took one last look at the small grave where Edouard had sunk forever.

Since Edouard's death, Berta never took off her black dress, hats, and ribbons, which he loved so much. She would never forget their courageous friendship. Berta would remain faithful to her friend's memory until the day she died, a dozen years later. She would buy his paintings and organize the first retrospective exhibition in honor of the maestro.

Mutual influences

Manet influenced the Impressionists and the Impressionists influenced Manet. Inspired by Monet, Renoir, and Morisot, Manet began to paint outdoors, in gardens, and brightened his color palette. Morisot's influence on Manet is particularly evident in his flower paintings and his later paintings, which were inspired by the Parisian fashion world.

The collaboration between the two artists was strong, reciprocal and fruitful. Barth was influenced of course by Manet but also by his source, Degas, Renoir, Pentane-Latour. Barth absorbed everything she learned from her teachers and colleagues and used these teachings as a toolbox to arrive at her own original work whose aim was to immortalize the fleeting under a certain light.

In her last paintings, Barth went even further than her Impressionist colleagues and perfected the supposedly unfinished nature of their works, which caused such strong rejection by their contemporaries.

The death of Bertha

Berthe died in March 1895 of pneumonia, at the age of fifty-four, and was buried in the Manet family tomb in the Passy cemetery next to her husband Eugène. Next to them are buried Édouard and his wife Suzanne. A year after her death, her Impressionist friends, together with her daughter Julie, organized a retrospective exhibition in her honor, which allowed the scope of her work to be seen for the first time.

Berthe was very important to her colleagues, as an artist and a friend. When Renoir was announced in Aix-en-Provence, Provence Upon Berthe's death, he rushed to her funeral and said: "Life is a desert." The separation from Berthe Morisot was difficult.

On the eve of her death, Bertha wrote to Julie:

I love you on the verge of death, I love you after death. You have only brought me joy, never sorrow. I would so much like to last until your wedding… Parting is inevitable. Wipe a tear from your eyes. You are endowed with beauty and wealth, make the right use of them. If Degas establishes a museum, tell him to hang a picture of Manet.

International recognition

Berthe Morisot's paintings are exhibited in the best museums in the world. The largest collection, over eighty works, is in the museum Marmot Monet In the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Most of the works came to the museum in 1993 from the estate of the painter's grandson, Denis Roer, one of the three sons of her daughter Julie Manet and her husband Ernest Roer.

Three years later, the estate of Danny's brother, Julien Roer, will arrive at the museum, which includes three more paintings and furniture from his grandmother's living room.

On October 27, 1985, five robbers entered the Marmottan Museum about fifteen minutes after it opened. Three of them gathered the eight guards and fifty visitors at gunpoint in one of the halls and forced them to lie on the floor.

Two of them took down the pictures they wanted from the walls, five by Monet, two by Renoir and… one by Berthe Morisot, the one showing a girl with a fan. The police investigation revealed that a Japanese mobster, who had served five years in a French prison for selling heroin, had used the opportunity to make connections with local bank robbers.

The international collaboration was successful in the first stage. The value of the stolen paintings was estimated at $15 million. In the home of the mastermind of the robbery, whose artistic taste is beyond doubt, was found the catalog of the Marmottan Monet Museum with the stolen paintings circled. Even hardened gangsters considered Berthe Morisot to be equal in value to Monet and Renoir…

In December 1990, the paintings were found, in fairly good condition, in a villa in Porto-Vecchio, Corsica. The minor damage they had sustained was repaired and thus, after a five-year absence, Monet, Renoir, and Morisot returned to their home.

Want to read more about Edouard Manet?

• Another day in Paris: a visit to the Marmottan Monet Museum – An excellent article by Dr. Orna Lieberman dealing with one of the most important Impressionist museums in Paris, which also displays works by Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, among others.
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• The breakfast on the lawn that shocked the Parisian bourgeoisie – Orly Gonen's article about one of Manet's most famous paintings.

Sources:

Catherine Aventurier, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot: Un mystérieux duo, France 5, 2.7.2017 –
Correspondance de Berthe Morisot avec sa famille et ses amis, Quatre chemins, 1950 –