The great exhibition on Berthe Morisot, pioneer of Impressionism

The whole world knows the great names of Impressionism. More rarely, however, is that of Berthe Morisot, a talented painter among the pioneers of the French artistic movement, whose career is among the most brilliant of the century but who, until now, has rarely been the protagonist of exhaustive research. To fill this void, after the success at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, the artist’s masterpieces arrive at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, with the exhibition Berthe Morisot and the Art of the 18th Century. BERTHE MORISOT ON EXHIBITION IN PARIS Can be visited at Parisian institution until next March 3, the retrospective brings together 65 paintings, linking the work of the first impressionist woman and the works of her predecessors – Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau -, thus its influence should be highlighted.  Curated by Marianne Mathieu and Dominique d’Arnoult, the exhibition is based on unpublished sources such as letters, newspaper clippings, notes belonging to the artist and her husband Eugène Manet, which have allowed us to reconstruct the context and chronology of Morisot’s production .THE EXHIBITION AT THE MUSÉE MARMOTTAN MONET IN PARIS The exhibition itinerary opens with one of the painter’s most emblematic works, Au bal, while the first section explores the permanence of eighteenth-century art in the lifestyle and daily life of Berthe Morisot, an aspect which is reflected in the construction of a certain aesthetic taste. In the following chapter we fully enter the artist’s flourishing impressionist phase, flanked by some of the most significant works of his mature period, focused on female beauty (such as Femme à sa toilette; Jeune femme au divan and Le jardin à Bougival). Next, a section develops around a masterpiece by Fragonard on loan from the Louvre Museum: La Leçon de musique. THE LIFE OF BERTHE MORISOT Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges in 1841 into a wealthy bourgeois family: her father, Edmé Tiburce Morisot, was a state official, while her mother was believed to be the great-granddaughter of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (a fact now disproven ). Since access to the academy, at that time, was not allowed to women, Morisot trained in a home atelier, copying the great classics. The turning point in her artistic production was her meeting with Édouard Manet, with whom she formed a deep friendship in the 1860s, and whose brother she married.
[Immagine in apertura: Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), Au Bal, 1875 Huile sur toile, 62 x 52 cm. Paris, musée Marmottan Monet © musée Marmottan Monet, Paris]