In 1873, a young Claude Monet boldly announced to reporters in Paris that he and his friends were planning 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, Cézanne. 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

Evidently, Degas’s letter made an impression because shortly after that Morisot’s name was added to the list. She became the first woman to join an avant-garde group of men who wanted to paint scenes of everyday life rather than the grand historical themes favored by the powerful French Academy.

Breaking the rules

But how do you paint the transitory nature of modern life? How do you capture speed? And hurriedness? How do you convincingly place figures in outdoor light, which is so frustratingly ephemeral?

Like the other Impressionists, Morisot broke with the French Academy’s preference for highly polished pictures with invisible brushwork.

Moreover, 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 participated in 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 paintings portray the intimate, domestic world of women?

In fact, her choice of subjects was strategically motivated. In the late 1800s, figure painting offered women artists a way to establish their professional identity. However, Morisot’s choice challenged the conventional wisdom that women should stick to floral still lifes and watercolor landscapes.

Although she primarily focused on women, Morisot did occasionally turn her gaze toward a man. In the painting Eugéne Manet on the Isle of Wight, the occasion is her honeymoon on a popular island known for its 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?

Perhaps. Eugène Manet’s gaze is straightforward, but look closely at the woman in a pink dress. Her gaze is intentionally hidden by a window rail. Is Morisot expressing her own frustration with the male-dominated art world?

I suspect she knew her work was being viewed through a gendered lens. Monet painted just as many flowers, if not more, yet his work was described as original and vigorous. Many of the same critics described Morisot’s work as charming and delicate, just another way of saying “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 Edma, Morisot expressed regret that she did not work consistently with an art dealer to promote her work. By comparison, the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris promoted 1,500 Renoirs and 1,000 Monets. Morisot sold fewer than 40 paintings during her lifetime.

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 Morisot’s paintings and drawings.

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.”

And 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, partly 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 wearingly familiar: talent and hard work are never enough. We must become more competitive in the marketplace, even if it means mastering the “show-offy” self-promotion skills. Above all, we must keep telling ourselves “I can do this,” particularly when self-doubt begins to creep in.

Postscript: If you happen to be in Cleveland…

The art exhibition Manet and Morisot traces the evolution of a friendship between two groundbreaking artists: Impressionist Berthe Morisot and her brother-in-law Édouard Manet. The show honors their connection while lifting Morisot out of Manet’s shadow. See it at the Cleveland Museum of Art now thru July 5, 2026. Click the link for details.