Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 4 of 11

In the Garden at Maurecourt, painted 1884 by Berthe Morisot. 

Within this charmed scene that contains all the hallmarks of Impressionism: loose brushwork, dappled light and jewel-like colours, is another side of the famed French Impressionists, whose innovation and rejection of conventional painting, heralded Modern Art, as we know it. 

As a teenager, Berthe Morisot spent hours at the Louvre museum in Paris studying and copying famous, classical painting and sculpture alongside her older sister Edma, their art teacher, and accompanied by their mother. 

Born into an upper middle-class family Berthe and Edma were both encouraged to study art and their impressive talent was recognised early on. As a woman, Morisot couldn’t attend the École des Beaux-Arts, France’s national art school but her fluent painting and drawing and her self possession, always attracted the attention of other artists. 

And she met many of them while studying at the Louvre. Including a dapper and witty painter nine years older: Edouard Manet. The two of them formed a close and enduring friendship and she appears: dark eyed and soulful, in some of his most searing portraits. 

In 1874, the French Impressionists break out with their first daring and provocative exhibition, running counter to the official Salon. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne and Berthe Morisot. Respectable, understated, the consummate artist, she is a core member of this circle and the only woman exhibiting with them. 

In the same year, she marries Manet’s younger brother Eugene. Like Manet, Morisot summons real people from her life to model for her, sisters, friends’ children, sometimes servants and with an artists’ coat buttoned over her beautifully tailored clothes, she focuses on bringing them to life in beautiful surroundings. 

But what is the focus in the Garden at Maurecourt? 

Maurecourt is the lush, manicured estate outside Paris, the home of her sister Edma.  By this time Edma, an equally obsessed artist, has given up on painting after marrying at the age of 30. And eventually, she disappears from Berthe’s paintings too, except, possibly here. The young woman is at the centre of this painting but she has an elusive, barely contoured face. Just two dark drops for eyes and blurred hands resting in the violet shade of her skirt. She might be Edma or maybe her daughter, Berthe’s niece. The child next to her, with her back towards us, is probably Morisot’s own daughter, Julie. 

In the background, pulling focus, floral blobs of violet blue, white and lemon yellow and two empty chairs. Notice how the edges reveal the canvas underneath, as if there’s no time to attend to them. 

While Renoir’s portraits of women exude a deep sensuality; Morisot’s are down-to-earth and empathetic. For all the exuberance of beauty in this garden, there is a complexity of emotion beneath the surface of this lovely moment.