In 1873, Claude Monet boldly announced to reporters in Paris that he and his friends were going to stage their own art exhibition, independent of the old-fogeyish French Academy of Arts and its annual exhibition, famously known as The Salon.
At the time, the list of participants did not include their friend Berthe Morisot. So Edgar Degas wrote a letter to her mother:
We’ve put down half the money for the location and signed the contracts. I don’t think we’re creating a huge business that will compete with the Academy. But we might be a breath of fresh air.
I recommend the show to your daughter because I will be in it and the others, too….Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, CĂ©zanne. It seems to us that Mademoiselle Berthe Morisot’s name and talent are too well-suited to our mission to pass up.
Artist Edgar Degas, in a letter to Mme. Marie-Cornélie Morisot, 1874
Degas’s letter clearly made an impression because Morisot’s name was added to the list soon after. She became the first woman to join this avant-garde circle of men who rejected the historical themes of the French Academy in order to capture the pulse of everyday life.
Breaking the rules
But how do you portray modern life? How do you capture speed and hurriedness? How do you convincingly place figures in outdoor light when it is so frustratingly ephemeral?
Like her fellow Impressionists, Morisot rejected the French Academy’s preference for highly detailed pictures with invisible brushwork.
Instead, she began to use quick, feathery brushstrokes in an all-over pattern that eliminated the traditional, hierarchical relationship between foreground and background. By daring to do so, she became the first Impressionist to impress critic Paul Mantz, who was known to be a cautious analyst.
If there is a single true Impressionist in the group, it is Berthe Morisot. Her paintings have all the freshness of improvisation. I see the impression captured by a sincere eye, faithfully rendered by a hand that does not lie.
Art critic Paul Mantz, “L’Exposition des peintres impressionnistes,” Le Temps, 1877
The female gaze
From 1874 to 1886, Morisot joined seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions. Yet, today she is overshadowed by her male counterparts, most of whom took part in fewer shows. Is it because her work focuses on the intimate, domestic lives of women? (See the Third Impressionist Exhibition)
In fact, her choice of subjects was a strategic move. During the late 1800s, figure painting offered women artists a way to establish their professional identity—one that challenged the expectation that they stick to “safe” subjects like floral still lifes and watercolor landscapes.
While primarily focused on women, Morisot did occasionally turn her gaze toward men. In the painting Eugéne Manet on the Isle of Wight, the occasion is her honeymoon on an island famous for its scenic waterfront promenades.
The picture shows her husband watching a young girl who is looking out to sea. It’s a clever, modern take on the Albertian metaphor that a great painting is like a window on the world.
Is Morisot also making a political point?
Probably. Eugène’s gaze is straightforward, but look closely at the woman in a pink dress. Her gaze is intentionally hidden by a window rail. Is this Morisot’s quiet commentary on her own struggle for visibility in an art world dominated by men?
I believe she knew her work was being viewed through a gendered lens. Monet painted just as many flowers, yet his work was hailed as original and vigorous. In contrast, critics often dismissed Morisot’s work as charming and delicate, coded language for “dainty lady painting.”
No matter. Her letters hint at the wonderful camaraderie she felt with her male colleagues. In 1874, she wrote to her aunt:
If you have read any of the Paris newspapers, you must know I am one of a group of artists holding a show of our own, and you must have seen how little favor our exhibition enjoys in the eyes of the gentlemen of the press.
On the other hand, we are being praised in the radical papers. We are being discussed! We are all so proud of it, and we are all very happy.
Years later, in a letter to her sister, Morisot expressed regret that she did not work consistently with an art dealer to promote her work. The Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris promoted 1,500 Renoirs and 1,000 Monets. During her lifetime, Morisot sold fewer than 40 paintings.
Even so, her colleagues held her in high esteem. A year after her sudden death from pneumonia at the age of fifty-four, her friends Degas, Monet, Renoir, and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé organized a memorial exhibition of over 400 of her paintings and drawings.
Berthe Morisot, “Eugene Manet and His Daughter in the Garden” (1881) • MusĂ©e Marmottan Monet 
Berthe Morisot, “On the Veranda” (1884) • Private Collection 
Berthe Morisot, “Young Girl with a Vase” (1889) • Private Collection 
Berthe Morisot, “Woman at Her Toilette” (1875-80) • Art Institute of Chicago
To this day, it remains the most complete retrospective ever devoted to Berthe Morisot. One reviewer called the showcase “the poem of a modern woman as it is imagined and dreamed by a woman.”
Then her work faded from view
In two of the most widely read histories of French Impressionism, written by Lionello Venturi and John Rewald, Morisot is placed on the periphery of the movement.
Why? Who cancelled Berthe Morisot?
Ironically, she did. During her lifetime, only twenty-five percent of her work was in circulation, due to her reluctance to compete in the art market. Furthermore, eighty-five percent of her work was owned for nearly a century by private collectors and members of her own family. This created a crippling lack of institutional visibility.
Today, her legacy is seeing a resurgence, largely due to Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist, an outstanding retrospective organized in 2018 by major museums in Paris, Quebec, Dallas, and Philadelphia. This traveling exhibition underscored Morisot’s role as an essential founder of French Impressionism.
Lessons learned
If you’re a woman, the received wisdom from Morisot’s career feels wearisomely familiar: talent and hard work are never enough. We must become more competitive in the marketplace, even if it means mastering “show-offy” self-promotion techniques. Above all, we must keep telling ourselves, “I can do this,” especially in those moments when self-doubt begins to surface.
Postscript: If you happen to be in Cleveland…
See the exhibition “Manet and Morisot” at the Cleveland Museum of Art now thru July 5, 2026. The show traces the friendship between Impressionist Berthe Morisot and her talented brother-in-law Édouard Manet—while lifting Morisot out of Manet’s shadow.