In Our Time - Berthe Morisot

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the influential painters at the heart of the French Impressionist movement: Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). The men in her circle could freely paint in busy bars and public spaces, while Morisot captured the domestic world and found new, daring ways to paint quickly in the open air. Her work shows women as they were, to her: informal, unguarded, and not transformed or distorted for the eyes of men. The image above is one of her few self-portraits, though several portraits of her survive by other artists, chiefly her sister Edma and her brother-in-law Edouard Manet. With Tamar Garb Professor of History of Art at University College LondonLois Oliver Curator at the Royal Academy and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the American University of Notre Dame London.AndClaire Moran Reader in French at Queen's University BelfastProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Bert Morissau, 1841 to 1895, was an influential painter at the heart of the French Impressionist movement. While the men in her circle could freely paint in bars, brothels,

public spaces, and in the case of Eduardo Manet, paint Moriso herself many times, she captured the domestic world. Her work shows women as they were to her, informal, unguarded, not transformed or distorted for the eyes of men. And when it came to the new, fresher ways to paint, Morrisso stood out for her dairy. With him to discuss about Morisso are Tamar Garb, Professor of History of Art at University College London, Claire Moran, reader in French at Queen's University of Belfast, and Lois Oliver, curator at the Royal Academy and adjunct professor of art history at the American University of Notre Dame, London. Lois, what do we know about Burt Morrison's family in her early years? Burt Morsso was born on the 14th of January 1841 into a

well-to-do French family. Her father was a high-ranking civil servant and her mother also came from a family of public officials. She had two elder sisters, Eve and Edma, and their younger brother, Tebus, was born four years later in 1845. It was a very cultured upbringing. It was a very privileged upbringing. Until the age of eight, Bette was taught by a governess, Louisa, who introduced the family to English customs like birthday cakes trimmed with candles and also gave her a really early love of English literature. Then when she is about 11, the family moved to Paris and the girls are enrolled at one of the most reputable schools, and they're also given music and drawing lessons.

And this was a really pivotal time in the French art world. When she was 14 in 1855, she could have visited the first of the Paris World's fairs. And there she would have seen rims of art devoted to Angre, who was the great champion of academic classicism, also Delacroix, the leading proponent of romanticism. And then the notorious realist Gustav Corby opened his own solo pavilion of realism

in direct confrontation with that main event. So there's a real battle going on for the future direction of French painting. When she learned to paint, was she taught us this was a decorative accomplishment for a young lady so she could play the piano in the evenings after somebody had heard supper, that sort of thing? Indeed, her mother intended

that Bette and her sisters should become accomplished enough to produce drawings as gifts for their father. So she enrolled them for drawing lessons with Geoffroy Alphonse Chaucan and his drawing lessons were incredibly dull. He had them hatching with curved lines for curved surfaces, straight lines, flat objects close together in the shadows, far apart in the highlights.

And their elder sister Eve was so bored that she abandoned art altogether. But Edmair and Bette asked for a new teacher and they moved to study with Joseph Benoit Gieshaar and he taught them painting in front of the masterpieces in the Louvre. So she went to the Louvre with him? She did indeed and he immediately recognised her talent and he famously warned her mother.

He took her to one side and he said, Your daughters have such characters that my teaching is not going to lead them to paint pretty little pictures. they will become artists in your social circle. This will be revolutionary, even catastrophic. And Madam Moroosso smiles serenely and says she's prepared to face this danger. But what Bette and Edma also wanted to do was to learn to paint outdoors, and they do that with the landscape painter Coro.

And of course, that idea of painting outdoors, capturing transient light effects, becomes absolutely central to the impressionist project. Was it a common thing to go to the Louvre to copy paintings at that time? It was standard practice for artists to learn from the art of the past. If you were a young man, you might be able to study in the official Alcolde de Bozar, but that wasn't open to women until 1897, so much more typical for an aspiring woman artist to study with an independent painting or drawing master.

So let's just go back to when she went to the, Louvre. She went with a art teacher. It was essential to be chaperoned on your visits to the Louvre. Was a chaperone a painter? So you would go with your teacher but also with someone else to accompany you. So Madame Moriso, the girl's mother.

And that was the way it worked? That was the way it worked. Did many people do it? Or was it just people who are rich enough and all the rest of it? You certainly did need private means in order to access art education as a young woman. Thank you. Claire, so we talked about women painters. What

prospects were there for women painters in France to be professional to become at that time? Well, really, the prospects weren't great if you were a woman painter in the 19th century because, as Lois just said, you couldn't get into the Grande Ecole de Beauvoir, so you couldn't train to be a painter because only men could get into the Ecole de Bozart, and that wasn't until about 1890 that women could

enter the school and train to be painters. And there were lots of other barriers along the way. One of the main ones would be the fact that you needed to be chaperoned, as we said. And Moryso was lucky enough to have her mother who chaperoned her and various teachers and painters who chaperoned her. But otherwise, she couldn't access the type of exciting places that perhaps the Impressionists went like brothels or bars.

She couldn't go there because she was a woman. But interestingly, it was because she was a middle-class woman. And there's a big difference between the freedom of working-class women and middle-class women in the 19th century. So working class women will, although obviously they've been tougher life, they actually have more freedom in the city, whereas middle class women would be much more controlled, there's a lot more constraint.

And so to be a painter, in Moryso's situation, if you're middle class, she needed to have unofficial connections and go through unofficial channels. So her connections, her network, her network would be extremely important. And again, I'd go back to. her network her network begins with her mother

who's very well she's quite a strong personality and tends to know people with wealthy family so it comes to money it all goes back

to money at the end of the day Mori So is wealthy she belongs to a wealthy family who has connections but really it's through the manes

so this family we have a family of three brothers the manes and Eduar is the senior the eldest brother and he's the founder of impressionism really.

And these are wealthy, liberal Republicans. And their mother is actually an aristocrat. But they are very open-minded and very much engaged in 19th century Parisian culture. And Manet comes along and paints some of the most radical paintings ever known, including the Luncheon on the Grass in the 1860s and also Olympia. And these paintings have changed the course of modern life. It was scandalous. Absolutely scandalous.

Not only because of the topic, which generally includes naked women in various forms, but these middle class women who are undressed in the countryside, and that's in luncheon on the grass. But really in the style of painting, they are unfinished. They are not polished, and that's what's shocking to the Parisian audience. But Morizo makes her way into that milieu, and that's what transforms her career. Edwin Manor became an inspiration for it, didn't he? Oh, yes. That is debatable. I'm sure lots of people have things to say about this.

Yeah, she is inspired, but she has her own style of impressionism. So she is definitely influenced by the impressionist, by Manet, but she takes it in a different direction. So where he paints black, she paints white. And what about his brother whom? She eventually married. Oh, yes. He's the key piece. in the puzzle because she marries his younger brother, Eugène. There are three brothers, there's Edouard. She says her three brothers.

It's becoming like a sort of down, haven't you. Yeah, so Eugène is the middle brother, and he is some profession. So he doesn't really have a profession, but what he has is, again, he's a very supportive husband, and he has access to networks and access to money. And so he makes his way into Mory So's life, and they are a perfect. And again, without Eugène, I don't think she would have succeeded in the same way. So in many ways, she was well supported, as it were, from the start. Was she being directed to becoming a professional painter?

Did she find that direction out for herself? You know, it's interesting. Yes, she was encouraged, interestingly, again, by her mother. Her mother really believed in her, and I think we don't talk about this enough. Her mother thought she was a genius. She thought you can really make it in the art world. and Moryso absolutely wanted to succeed and absolutely wanted to sell her artwork.

Let's just spool back a bit tomorrow. Can you just briefly tell the listeners who are not up to speed on this, what made the Impressionists so distinctive? It's an interesting question because Impressionism, as we understand it, really emerges in the 1870s. Maneh, although we now consider him as one of the great progenitors, as one of the origins, you might say, of Impressionism,

did not himself think of himself as an impressionist. And in fact, the name only emerges in the middle 1870s. When a group of artists who saw themselves in opposition to what they saw as official culture, salon culture, etc., organized, yes, the academy or the salon, which was the arena for showing works in an annual format, they formed their own independent group, exhibiting group. And it was only after the second exhibition of the show. this group in 1876 that they started to become called the Impressionist. They were first an

independent salon. So there are a number of ways of thinking about it. You could think about it as a self-conscious oppositional group of artists who set up an institutional way of functioning outside of state patronage and outside of the general systems of support. But you can also think of it as a method and a style. And if you think about it, when you imagine Impressionist paintings, You imagine works that are made with a very loose brush, often out of doors on plennair, an interest in light, an interest in sensation, an interest in a kind of naturalist celebration of opticality of what one sees with the eye, and the idea that painting is a language that can find a way to represent what the eye experiences. Now, Manet was less interested in that than Moriso. And some people, to go back to the question that we were discussing a little earlier, some people think that Moriso's influence on Manet was as profound as Manet's influence on Morisso.

Because Manet moves to a kind of light touch impressionist brushstroke in collaboration with Moriso, who is very committed to that kind of work. In fact, the most committed out of all the impressionist, you might argue. There was, as I read, there was a feeling that impressionism was good for women because it was a softer option and it was a softer thing altogether and the women's nature would incline to it more readily than that of men. Is there anything? I know this is absolutely true. Already from the 1870s, in around 1877, Moriso is described as the arch Impressionist. And you might think that that's a compliment, but in fact it's a kind of insult disguised as a compliment.

because it presupposed an understanding of human capacity and human nature as it was understood in the 19th century, which meant that women were naturally more superficial, that women were naturally more sensory in their response to the world, that they had the nerve endings on their bodies sent out a kind of, as a sickness it would have been thought of as hysteria. But as a propensity, it would have been thought of as women can restrict themselves to the superficial apprehension of the natural world.

Why? Because they're not that cognitively complex. So, yes, Moryso was described as the quintessential impressionist. And Impressionism was often thought of as a feminine style. So how did she push her way through to become central to the impressionist movement? Was she the only woman doing this at the time? I mean, at that level. Mary Cassat was the other figure who was equally important.

Cassat came along to the whole thing later, 1870s, early 1880s, whereas Moriso, I mean, Cassette was an American who came to Paris, so there's a different story there. But Moriso, as we've heard from the 1860s, was already involved in various networks, which positioned her in a space in which she could take advantage of those, and because she was independently wealthy, she had the kind of freedom to push things. But I think we go back to her professionalism, which was absolutely crucial. She did not want to be seen as somebody who was just an accomplishment painter. And her sister, Edma, after marriage,

who was equally talented as she was, as a young woman, gave up painting. After she married, she gave up painting. It was a much more conventional trajectory. Thank you. Lai, let's turn to her paintings then. So what was she doing that attracted attention? Was it because what she was doing, she was doing particularly well,

even though the subject wasn't a regional? Can you just tell us? Well, there's this hugely important painting that she exhibited at the first impressionist exhibition of 1874. It's called Lebesot, the cradle, and it depicts her sister, Edma, watching over the sleeping form of her baby daughter Blanche. It's an incredibly tender picture.

There is this white gauze canopy draped over the cradle, and Edma's form echoes its protective shape, so she's sitting with her head on her hand, and her other hand is protected. collectively around the cradle and fiddling slightly with the frill of that canopy. And it's as if she's waiting for the infant's deep slumber that is going to allow her then to pursue other tasks. And it is such a poignant painting because, of course, Edma was an artist too. They had trained together.

They had exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon from 1864 onwards. And then in 1869, their lives take completely done. different directions when Edma marries, and she gives up art entirely in order to focus on being a wife and mother. So it's a picture that really resonates with a dilemma faced by many women artists in the 19th century. It's very well described, but I like to know how she got there. Well, people, did they resist her? Well, it's interesting because she's very determined, you know, as part of this group, to show work in the first Impressionist exhibition, and she does so. And she is actually recognised at that moment as somebody with something unique and interesting to give.

I think, you know, very much like the other artists at that time, she is interested in the modern. She's interested in the modern as experienced by women. And she actually has a very unique perspective because her lived experience is different to that of her male colleagues. And insofar as it's different, she finds a language to make the modern suburban life. of women into almost a kind of heroic meditation on the world. It's a way she paints in a way that her male colleagues could not paint with a kind of sympathy for the experience of this aut bourgeois life, this life of the upper middle class Parisian suburbs.

And in that sense, she has a kind of a unique sensibility. Yes, to reflect on that a little bit more, it's not only the themes, the topics are, you know, different from what the other impressionists are doing and that they focus more in the home. And because she couldn't, she hadn't access to the outside world. So, you know, we've already mentioned that. Not in the same way. It had to be, it was mediated access to the outside world.

When she went to paint outdoor, did you have to take a shop around with her there? Yes. Yes. So that kind of ruined the experience. It was filtered. Yeah. And I think what's really interesting in paintings like, the cradle is that she brings the outside in. And how does she do that? She does that through light.

And she does that through the colour white. So I'm going to go back to that in that in the cradle, for example, you see this magnificent white. It's filtered all across the painting. And what she's doing here is she's showing the power of paint to transform reality. And so the other impressionists see this, that she can do things with paint. She can make the ordinary, extraordinary. She can bring objects to life. And she, it's interesting the type of objects she chooses because they're female objects in many, you know, objects that would be associated with the domestic sphere, like tea towels, aprons, net curtains, ordinary things from the home, but she transforms them into something majestical. And to go back to the criticism that's used,

Aunt Mori, so it's often said that her works are magical. And that's something that I think we do, see through her use of white. You wanted to come in, Lowe's. I was going to say something about how distinctively feminine many of her subjects are, and she does paint women and girls, but crucially it's where she paints them, and she's quite strategic about that. So the archetypal male artist would be that Flanner, Baudelaire's painter of modern life, who would be strolling the boulevards, painting the late-night city spaces.

But what you have with Morisso is that her subjects reflect her experience, and the experience of the women around her. For example, there is a picture that she paints a summers day exhibited in 1880, and it depicts two fashionably dressed women on a boat in the Bois de Belorne, which was the public park close to her Paris home. So she's painting these spaces that are easy to access, private gardens, at home, public parks. And what's even more strategic here is that it's posed by professional models

and they're sitting in a boat. And so is Mori So, because then she can work undisturbed on the water. And she does write in her letters that as soon as she sets up an easel in public, it can attract unwanted attention. Do you want to? Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a really interesting discussion because, of course, she turns the domestic sphere and the domestic garden into an arena which is way bigger than one might think.

And she paints her husband, Jujan in the garden. I mean, she's one of the first women artists to paint. a man in the role of just a domestic father. You know, he's there playing with the child, so that it's quite unique. But it's also true to say that there are works, particularly in the early years, where you do see Paris forming a backdrop. And you do see the industrial landscape. And so there is also...

The washerwoman, for example, there is also a sense of the awareness of industrial modernity, of the growing metropolis, of the new formation of Paris, the so-called capital of the 19th century. And we see this. Sometimes you'll find the women in the paintings standing behind a barrier or behind a balcony or with Paris and the Envalide

and the buildings of Paris in the background or the industrial chimneys quite far away. But you do also get a sense that this garden, this domestic world happens in a broader context and it is a modern metropolitan context. And I think an interesting point about our outdoor scenes compared to the male impressionist is that it's rare to see the sky.

So even when she paints the outdoors, they feel like indoor and intimate scenes. What does that say to you? That says to me that her world was constructed from the interior and her world was about people. I think she was really motivated by relationships. Relationships with her friends, relationships with her family,

relationships with this network again. And so it was a very intimate world. and she really engages with her cissures also in that way. Can we come back and can I give you, Lois? We know quite more, obviously, because there's more of them, how the male impressionists worked and how the men-imperionists depicted women. Was Morrisso's depiction radically different, very different?

How different? Can you tell us? We've talked a little bit about the kind of spaces where she paints, but I think what is also incredibly important is that she challenged, some of the ways in which male artists had depicted women in the past. So her career coincides with a rediscovery of 18th century painting and collectors are particularly keen on what we might call boudoir scenes, so intimate interiors with young women in various states of undress. And Morisso paints about 20 variations on that theme.

And she'll depict her young model stepping out of a Louis XVIth style, 18th century bed from her own suite of bedroom furniture. But she is presented so demurely in a long white nightgown. She's just reaching with her feet for her mule slippers. And she's certainly not looking out flirtatiously at the viewer. There's a real introspection to it. And Renoir later described Morisot's work as having a kind of virginal quality. And I think what it really is is that she empathises with that female experience of the girls

and the women who she paints. Was that noticed at the time? Well, of course, Renoir said it, and there was another critic who looked at her work and said, this is the poem of a modern woman dreamt by a modern woman. So they did see it as distinctive. Wouldn't the word modern have particular application,

would they say, oh, this is modern, or would they say, oh, she is one of the impressionists? I think people have a very limited notion of modernity because we're so associated with the public sphere and this is the way in which it's been mediated to us with bars and cafes and street scenes and spectacle and trapeze artists and all those forms of entertainment

we think of trains and steam and engines and the whole industrial apparatus of modernity. But if you think about it, none of that is possible without a whole substructure of life which supports it and keeps it going. So equally modern is the life of the suburbs, the life of the home,

the domestic sphere. I mean, that is actually what underpins the very capacity of men to move differently through the city. I mean, it's not true. And as, you know, we've already said, of course, women from different social classes had different ways of accessing the city. But it is really important to remember that Moriso comes from this upper middle class environment of, you know, a modesty and chasteness and being a good wife and all these values were so very important. This is part of why she was so revolutionary. that you managed to turn that work, that world, that bigger pardon, into a universe of painting.

So I think it's equally modern, but it's not recognised as modern. Well, I think it's starting to be recognised as modern, and that's what's really important in critical focus on the interior. We realise that the city, which was constructed, when we think of Paris, Paris being constructed by Houseman in the 19th century and this exterior world, but Houseman created those apartment buildings. The impressionist had to live somewhere and they lived ordinary lives

and we haven't looked either I don't think art history has looked enough at the interior works by male impressionists also So where'd you go from there? Does this make her less distinctive? Well, I think she was very influential in terms of the way in which she found

because her work was not unknown her work was known she was showing at all of these exhibitions and she was selling well and she was selling well and her colleagues, Durgar, Manet, Monnet, Renoir, they all admired her enormously. And I think she gave a strength

to a certain kind of sensibility, not only in terms of her technique and her way of working with paint and surface and whiteness, etc., but also to a certain kind of subject matter. So I think that we, you know, so often she's thought of as somebody who draws from those male colleagues,

but actually I think she was a powerful figure within the group. Yeah, she must be, they let her organize these exhibitions, which is quite a big hand for her to deal, isn't it really? Yeah, and I think there were very much collective endeavours, but I think she was there at the conversations in which they were deciding what works were going to be shown

and how many and which venues they were going to use and the relationship with dealers and the market and all of those conversations of what it is to have a modern practice in a modern city. She was part of those conversations. Can I ask you this, Lice, was she influential on the other impressionist, was her work influential on the other impression,

Impressionists? I think the way she paints is perhaps the absolute essence of impressionism. We have this wonderfully swift skeins of colour that she'll use to describe forms. And yet there's an absolute understanding of the form beneath that. And often a wonderful geometry to her paintings. And I think she's very consistent in what she paints and certainly greatly admired by her colleagues. But did she influence them? Do you mean, did they imitate what she painted?

I would generally imagine. Well, yes, I think we can point perhaps Tamar would like to give an example. Yeah, I mean, Mane is the key example there, because one thinks of Mane as such a, you know, a figure who generates almost a world on his own. But actually Mane was very much influenced by her and particularly by the kind of airiness of her touch and the use of the brush and the sense of this light-filled world.

Absolutely. I think so. And I think, I mean, I think Ruan Mone as well, you know, they of course had their own language as well and it was very much in dialogue with her. But insofar as any of them influenced each other, she's as, you know, as influential as any of the others, absolutely. Is there any painting you want to bring to the floor here, what you can tell?

I mean, it isn't exactly the medium to show paintings, but I'm sure you can get around that. Well, there are a couple of paintings that are quite interesting. One is her portrait of her friend, Marie Ubarre, and this is a portrait from the early, 1870s. And I think this is a portrait that answers Manet's Olympia. So it can go back to see that kind of mutual exchange going on there. Olympia, the prostitute. Olympias is, um, cortisan prostitute, high class prostitutes, whatever it is, lying on a bed. Lying on a bed. And scandal. And very scandalous

because she's glaring at the male viewer. It's not just because she's naked and lying on a bed and wearing kind of, it's a jewelry that makes her more vulgar also. It's not that she's entirely naked Olympia is that she has some earrings and she's wearing these dainty slippers and so she's more vulgar because of what she's wearing. You'll have to decode that to me sometime. And so Marie Ubar is a wealthy middle-class woman, lifelong friend of Mory Soes. A Morysau paints her in a style that answers Olympia but it's totally different because here Marie is lying on a bed in this kind of indiscriminate-looking room, so she's not showing her wealth or her status.

And she's wearing this gown, which to a modern-day viewer may look like a glamorous gown. However, it's actually a tea gown. This is what women wore indoors in the 19th century. So it's the modern-day equivalent of, I do know, T-shirt and leggings, you know, your friend coming to visit. And so it's in her natural environment. She's presenting this woman in her natural environment.

and she presents her in this majestic white. And so it captures, it captures the viewer. And she's holding up a fan. And the fan is a type of visual language in the 19th century as are flowers that can all be decoded. And so the fan is like a flag saying, look at me. I think it's also interesting because the way in which we look at Morris's paintings

is with a whole lot of expectations of what women might paint and therefore we start to interpret the paintings with those kinds of assumptions. And a very interesting painting is one called the wetness Angel feeding Julie Manet. You look at this painting and you think, oh, this is a mother and child. Here is a woman sitting in a garden breastfeeding a baby. But of course, a woman of Morysa's class would never have breastfed her own baby. That would have been a complete anathema.

You had a wet nurse who came in and fed your child for you if you were a woman of Marisor's class. So here you have a situation of a woman painter, painting. her own infant being suckled by a woman who's actually working. This is not an image of motherhood. It's an image of labour. This is a working woman in an environment. And there are two forms of labour here. One is the labour of the woman painter. The second is the labour of the woman who is hired to feed the child of the painter. Now this is a kind of dynamic that could never exist with the male painter because you wouldn't be in that kind of, you know, that dynamic just wouldn't exist. So there are these kinds of unique constructions of intersubjectivity and of

painting that actually become really, really fascinating to think with in her work. The only man we know that she painted was her husband, one of the monies, Jean. Can you tell the listeners why she painted so few men or so little of him? Well, it wouldn't have been proper for a woman to paint a man in the 19th century to start off with. And even, even, to paint her husband. You know, it wasn't really a typical scene to be painted by any painter in the 19th century. But she painted Eugène, her husband, quite a lot.

But he was a bit of a reluctant model. She painted him quite a bit with the daughter, and we've mentioned that already. The daughter, Julia, her daughter, Julie. She had when she was 33. She was, yeah, a little bit older when she had her daughter. But what's interesting about the portraits of Eugène, is the fact that he obviously doesn't want to be painted.

And there's one image in particular, which is on the Isle of White, where they're on their honeymoon. And for whatever reason, Moryso decides that she's going to paint her husband. And he's very uncomfortable. He's sitting sideways on a chair, looking out a window. He really doesn't want to be there. He looks a bit grumpy.

And in this picture, you see him. He wants to get out and enjoy the sights of his holiday. but instead he's constrained. And I think it's interesting because it's unusual to see a man constrained. We're used to seeing women by windows and the window is a symbol of a threshold between interior and exterior.

It's a really wonderful picture that one. They had married in December 1874 and then they came on honeymoon to the Isle of White and London in August 1875. And we know why Agen is twisting round on his chair, boater, blazer on, ready to go out because there was so much to see. Their visit coincided with regatta week. And before arriving on the island, they'd also spent a day at Goodwood races.

So this honeymoon encompassed two of the most highly anticipated events of the English summer season. And what's so interesting is at that point, Bairt Morrison thought she might establish her career in England, painting high society. and of course the Isle of White had been hugely fashionable ever since Queen Victoria had chosen it for her palatial residence, Osborne House. But whilst Morissau is in England, she makes another discovery that really changes her art in other ways. She goes on a day trip to ride and she finds what she describes as a superb Reynolds for sale for a little less than two francs.

It's perhaps a print, possibly a drawing. But then when they get to London, she visits all the major art collections and she develops this lifelong enthusiasm for the artist Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney. And actually, when you look at how her brushwork becomes even freer after that visit, and she starts to paint half-length female figures that slightly resemble 18th century English portraiture, I think one of the visual elements in that new impressionist style that she's developed, is the art of Gainsborough and what Reynolds described as his

odd scratches and marks. It's been remarked, I think, that whereas men painted women looking straight at them in a saucy, come on, sexy way, I am being a shorthand. Excuse me, please, if you will. But she didn't.

And they were innocent, they were not up for sale, or they weren't trying to grab the men who were looking at them. Is there any truth in that? I don't think she was interested in that kind of sexualized image of, um,

But, you know, there's a different kind of sensuality that's at stake there. So she does a paint, for example, a woman sitting at the mirror doing her toilette with a beautiful, beautiful naked back. You know, she takes pleasure in the sensation of flesh and flowers and mirror reflections and curtains and lace. So there is a kind of, you could say, an erotics of surface. It's not that she's a person who's devoid of understanding the sensual complexity and depth of surface appearance. It's just that it's not sexualized in that rather more conventional way that we associate with commodified sex of the 19th century or of a kind of flirtatiousness that is embodied in some kinds of representations of women. Of course not all.

But I don't think that it would be true to say that it's without sensuality. I think it's a highly sensual practice. Did she lead the way when she became successful and ran these exhibitions and was seen to be a key person, were other women encouraged by that? And did they follow the banner? It's very important to remember that even though the women impressionists, and there were four of them, actually,

we weren't going to that in detail, were distinctive. And in terms of the history of modern painting, they're very important. There were actually hundreds of women. striving to be professional artists in the 19th century. So why did you only one or two get through? Well, because these two got through, because of the way in which the history of modern painting is written,

Impressionism has a particular role. It's very, very much prized when we think of 19th century painting and the way in which 19th century painting has been written about in France, Impressionism is a very, very important and formative movement. But when you think about all the women, the battles to get into the Ecole de Bozard, the battles to get onto the salon jury,

all of these women published their own women's newspaper in the 1880s. There was an annual Salon de Fum, a woman's salon in the 1880s, where sometimes a thousand paintings were shown. What is the shape of her reputation being since her death? Let's start with you, Claire, on this one. Well, I think in different ways in the 19th century, she was well known. And I think we have to go back to the critical response

in the 19th century, 19th century critics. In ways she got a lot of press, and people recognised critics recognised her strengths although as we said they're you know we can temper that because there were a lot of backhanded compliments about it being her art was so feminine was so delicate and so wonderful whereas you know Monet's art

was quite similar in style but it was never called delicate or charming or feminine or anything like that what happens after is that at the time the 20th century it comes along. We get a lot of, I'm going to say, male American critics who privileged the idea of Paris and of the notion of the lone genius really as well, of these painters who were self-made. And I think one of the reasons that Mory So doesn't get the credit she's due is that her art is very obviously collaborative. Her art is very obviously part of networks. And she reveals the networks throughout her subjects. She shows the support of the impressionists themselves. And that isn't really very sexy. I think the other thing that makes a difference is how works get collected and put on public display. And we are so fortunate in this country to have magnificent collections that were shaped a lot by Samuel Courtold,

who was a great philanthropic benefactor, gave money £50,000 to buy modern French painting for the national collection, also built up his own collection that's now part. of the Courthold. But he makes this list of who he sees as the key figures from the modern art movement. And they are all men. And he even writes to the National Gallery and says, these are the key men of the movement. And he has left out that, Moriso, and he's left out Mary Cassat. And there's really no reason why he did that. It was just a blind spot. I think that's really an important point. And I think it's the way in which 20th art history has been written, which has privileged the reputation of what was seen as a sort of a central

core of male artists, the manes, the monies, the Renoir, Sizzley, perhaps, you know, these are the figures who identified with Impressionism. And some key textbooks, key collecting practices, then helped to perpetuate this very restricted notion of Impressionism. And it took until feminist art history in the late 70s and early 1980s for that whole balance to be redressed, where women's scholars, for the most part, started to look in the basements of collections across Europe, across the United States, and to start to dig out paintings that had been sidelined or went to private family collections. A lot of Morissot's work went through her daughter, Julie, and her husband, through the family called the Ruah family,

who held onto the work, and it didn't go into public collections. So I think the point that Lois makes about public collections is crucial. The point about the way in which academic art history is written means that Moriso was written out of the story and it took feminist art history, I think, to rediscover her. And I think just another point there is we're talking about Anglo-American criticism and it's not the same in France. Morisso's legacy has been much stronger in France

and she's much more recognised in France. She's a household name in France. She's not a household name over here in America. So I think we need greater collaboration between American and English scholars and French scholars. And hopefully that will happen in the future. I'm not as confident about it because many of us, I mean, I wrote a book called Women Impressionists in the early 1980s. And, you know, many of friends and colleagues writing monographs on Morrowso in the 80s. And, you know, it still astounds me that she remains as unknown as she does.

And I wonder what has happened to all that scholarship, which should so have transformed the landscape, but which seems not to have done. Have you any views on that? Well, there is going to be an exhibition coming up in the spring at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which is a major collaboration. I'm co-curating it with the Marmotan Museum in Paris. And that is actually going to be the first major exhibition of Morisso in this country since 1950.

And also in relation to that, I think the way artistry, has changed nowadays in that you've people like myself who work in French studies, you've scholars in material culture studies, and I think figures like Moryo, because of the many different ways you can go into her work, are interesting to a host of different scholars. So I think the interdisciplinary focus of modern day art history, contemporary art history could really benefit somebody like Morysoe. Well, thanks a lot to Louis Oliver, Tamar Gabb and Claire Moran and our studio engineer Michael Milham. Next week, it's the point in evolution when fish sprouted legs and began to walk on land. The fish tetraport transition. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we leave out that you wish you'd said? There was one thing that I think that's very interesting again when you think about the uniqueness of her perspective was the portraits she did of her sister pregnant. Now, the image of pregnant femininity is something which really doesn't exist in portraiture as a genre.

When you think of a pregnant female figure, you think perhaps of a Madonna figure, and there's ways in which it can be allegorical and symbolic. But a matter-of-fact portrait of a contemporary woman in the state of confinement, as it was described in the 19th century, because of course, you know, because of the taboos around women's bodies and women's sexuality and fleshiness, You didn't reveal yourself in public after you were visibly pregnant. So Moriso's sister Edma

comes back to the family home during her confinement where she is enfolded in the domestic environment of her mother. And Moriso paints her some extraordinarily strong and poignant portraits.

One of her sitting alongside her mother who's reading and you get the sense the sort of oral envelope that surrounds them of the mother and sister of the artist reading together. And you can imagine Moriso in that environment in which she herself is listening to whatever is being read, but he's also painting at that moment.

Or you get portraits that are very, very direct of Edma looking out with her huge bulbous belly and her hands resting on the belly in a way that would not have been regarded as even decorous because it draws attention to her pregnant state. So I think these are the kinds of unique ways in which she turns the domestic sphere into something heroic. I think there's also a wonderful melancholy about a lot of Morissot's work.

We often think of the Impressionist paintings as sunny and filled with the joys of life, but often what Moro is doing, she writes about wanting to capture something of what goes by. So there's that idea that each of these moments she's come to capture is something that will be lost. And I think in the really tender portrait she makes of her daughter, Julie, we see that particularly.

So Julie is recorded from early babyhood right up to the cusp of womanhood. And one that I think is especially moving. So is Julie in mourning for her father, Agen Manet. And she's sitting on a sofa and beside her is her pet greyhound, Leitees, who was given to her by the poet Malamey as a gift when her father died. And then in the background on the left, there is an empty chair and it is sketched so economically as if it's almost not there. And of course, that empty chair suggests the idea of absence and of loss. And I guess for us looking at it today, we know that three years after Julie's father had died, she also lost her mother because Bette Morissau caught influenza whilst nursing Julie through the illness.

and she then died in March 1895, age just 54. And just linked to that, the whole idea of the decoration of interiors, because I think some of the furniture in the paintings we've mentioned, some of those already, the Louis Cansby says furniture, she plays with this furniture in different ways. And, for example, the wallpaper in one painting, I think it's a painting of, Edma again. And Edma, again, was the sister who was equally talented, but wasn't able to be a

professional painter. And so, yes, she ends up being quite miserable in her role as wife and mother, and she's living in Brittany. But in some of this, one of these with the wallpaper, the wallpaper is presented as a type of cage. There's a cage-like motif across the wallpaper. So I think, I think Morya so uses decoration in a very, interesting way and I think that hasn't been studied quite enough in Impressionism. We'll also see it in the couches, the sofas, because we have new types of furniture, which are arriving in France. This is, you know, the era of mass production. We have matching curtains and matching sofas and she uses the same sofa quite a lot in her pictures. And in those

sofas, then you can see the family dynamic that Tamar mentioned. You almost feel like you could be there. You'd be sitting on. that. So if it looks familiar, feels comfortable. Another thing that I think is worth considering, because we've talked a little bit about her networks and how very connected she was, but it's worth mentioning that in the 1890s, just before she dies, she at that point is already a grand dame, you might say, of impressionism. Impressionism, in fact, is over by then. It's the rise of symbolism and a whole different way of understanding what avant-garde painting might be. She's very, very close to Malarmé,

the poet. And she's close at that point to Renoir, who's moving as well into a kind of symbolist language. And she's moving in the most kind of refined circles of the Parisian avant-garde. And they adore her. And she is really, I think she's a central figure for them. I mean, Malarmé writes very, very beautifully about her. And when she dies, the symbolist poets gathered together to do an exhibition, a posthumous exhibition, in the year after her death. And at that point, her reputation is huge. It's enormous. So it is then so extraordinary to think how she fades into anonymity through the early years of the 20th century onwards.

Do I have an explanation of that? One word? One word? Sexism. I do think so. I do think so. I think that goes back to the side. that the idea of the 19th century artist as a protean, masculine, fecund, virile subject, becomes so dominant.

And this grows particularly in the second half of the 20th century with abstract expressionism and gesture and the heroic, you know, pyrotechnics of masculinity. There isn't a space in that imagination for a figure with the subtlety and the, you know, this extraordinary facility. doesn't speak to that kind of brevura subjectivity. It speaks to a different kind of subjectivity. Would you agree with that? I would. I'd also say, to come back to that retrospective exhibition of her work, one of the paintings that makes a big impact on visitors is her self-portrait.

And the way she presents herself is so confident. She's standing tall and proud. She is wearing this golden brown high-necked bodice with a black cravat around her neck. And there is this flourish in the corner, which is her palate and her brown. brushes. But on her bodice is this embroidered flower, a red embroidered flower. And it really resembles the red ribbon of the legion d'onnair. And I think that's her giving her impressionist equivalent of that official award. And I think something to go back to what Tamara said about her legacy, I think what's really unfortunate with the criticism from the 20th century,

it's not only women that have been misrepresented. It's also the men, because when you start reading the letters between Monet, Manet, Renwar and Moriso, as I've done more recently, a different portrait of those men comes to the four. They are not these, you know, there's this image out there of this kind of hard, lone, you know, suffering genius. I mean, I know that, particularly with somebody like Van Gogh later on, that's how that was crystallised. But really what's really interesting is that they speak about their emotions, they speak about their problems. And particularly there were letters I looked at recently from Monet to Moyo. And he was writing about his children being ill and how that stopped him from working and how difficult it was for him to paint.

We don't think like that about the impressionists. We don't think about them having caring roles or being emotionally upset by something as trivial as a difference. child getting sick. And so I think we need to review how we look at Impressionist art more broadly, and all artists really. To be almost pedantic, to go back, when she

started to paint outside, out of doors, did she find that difficult? For Koro, wasn't it? Koro. Yeah. Yeah, when she was studying with Koro, that practice of painting out of doors was absolutely part of the way in which he taught. But I think

what's very important is to remember that many, many artist painted out of doors throughout the 19th century, what was transgressive was to say that that was a finished painting that you could put in the public domain, because most often it was thought that you would sketch out of doors. You'd make an eschise. You would make a sketch of the natural world. And then in your studio, back home, you would reorganise your composition. You would use all your sketches and you would make something finished. One of the key and radical gestures of the impressionism was to say that that work out of doors was the painting. It was not a preparatory stage on route to something more finished.

And so they move away from that academic notion of finish. And that's one of the criticisms that's made of Morsesau, where they say, oh, you know, pity she can't finish her work. They make it of all the impressionist. Cizanne is constantly being described as an artist who doesn't know how to finish. And that is an absolute sin. But that's what they turn around because it's pretty. and it's the whole way of apprehending the world of sensate experience,

which is there tangibly in the brushstroke. And it doesn't need to be polished and varnished and, you know, sealed. And it doesn't need to be complete. And it doesn't because completion is in itself a proposition. Claire then. Yes, I wonder what both of you think about the idea of whether these paintings are staged to look as though they're unfinished. Well, I think that one thing that's absolutely crucial is that the not.

non-finie, as it was called, the non-finish becomes in itself an aesthetic. So it's true that sometimes, even the notion of spontaneity is itself sometimes very contrived. So that becomes part of the language of impressionism becomes a series of ways of working that stand for the non-finished and stand for the spontaneous. We can see it actually. We talked earlier about the painting of Agen-Manei looking out of the window on the Isle of White. and it's a really grid-like structure to that painting. It looks spontaneous because he's twisting around on his chair, but it's really well constructed, and we can contrast that with some pictures she did

from the upstairs window of the same holiday cottage, where she's trying to paint the figures on the parade in West Cowles, and she writes and says, it's so difficult, everyone keeps moving, I can't capture them in the right place. So I think she often grabs ideas very swiftly in pencil drawings, in watercolours, and then she thinks about them quite fully formed

before she'll then set them up with her family or with professional models to paint swiftly the idea that she's been thinking about for a while. But the other thing about painting outdoors, I think it's often other people that make it difficult. So it's not the capturing so much the transient effects of light or the movement of modernity. It's that other people interfere.

You mean people going for a walk and saying, what are you up to? She goes specially to try and paint a watercolour. outside on ride pier, it's very windy, but the sailors laugh at her hat and it just completely throws her, she packs up all her stuff and decides to take a walk around the town instead. Well, I don't think, do you think that's massively significant? I think that's just a windy day and her hat's going to be blown off and you could happen to anybody. I think it's them laughing at her is the final straw, laughing at her hat and what she often

does. We think about them painting outside, but she does often do it from... How significant is that, but I'm just saying... How significant is it? Is that thinking of her as a painter? I think it means that she often chooses quite strategically how to paint outdoor views. So often it's in a private garden or it's through a window and there she really can work undisturbed or else it is on a boat.

So she's got her contained studio space and no one's looking over her shoulder and making fun. Claire? Yes, I think one thing that's really interesting we haven't spoken about is where she painted because she's quite different in that she paints in her home and her studio is often part

of her domestic environment. It's in the living room. And it's, you know, I think it's something that resonates to a lot of women nowadays because they want to keep their children under their watchful eye. And so the painting

materials are in a cupboard and she takes them out and then puts them back in which she goes about the kind of domestic duties. And I think that's why the domestic really is at the heart of all of this.

Can we come back to her? beginnings in a way. How far do you think she would have got if she didn't have real serious money and serious support behind her? Was there any evidence of people who didn't have that kind of support and finance getting anyone? There are a few stories. I mean, for interest, for example, an artist like Suzanne Valadon who was a model. She was a working class woman who was also a sex worker at one time, we think, and she was modeled for Degas. She turned things around in the early years of the 20th century to become an artist. And even You know, I think it was very, very much more difficult, though,

because, you know, as we've said, access to art education had to be privately paid for, for women. There wasn't any access to state education as there was for men. You had to go to private academies or to private teachers or be taught through, you know, all systems of tutelich that existed. So you could be, like Suzanne Valadon, in the studio of Degas, looking and learning and whatever, but it was very, very much more difficult.

I think it is the precise type. because she's born in the 1840s, and there is the Academy Julien that Rodolf Giuliam founds in 1868, and he has a women's class in that. And it attracts artists from all over the world, from the United States, from Scandinavia, and people are able to learn there at a fairly reasonable rate, though he does charge double for women

for what he charges for the men's teaching studio. So that's a bit cheeky. But you see, Moryso would have been 27 by then. It was a bit late for her. So being born in the 1840s, She really did need that, those private lessons that her family were very happy to provide for her. I think it's also important to realise that the kind of education that would have been appropriate for women was different. And a lot of this had to do with relationships to the model and the life model.

Because the life model was at the core still of French art education. And in, you know, the studios, private studios, as well as in the state academies. For a woman to paint the live model naked and particularly the male model. naked, which was really the norm in all these academies, would have been a real travesty. So there's a lot of anxiety around women and the body and women and the model. And this puts them at a disadvantage in relation to academic practice. But for someone like Morrison, this is why impressionism in a way works for her. She can find and make a whole transgressive, interesting modern practice without having to go down that part.

And though occasionally she does paint women with, you know, decalte or with their backs slightly revealed, she's not, doesn't really need to do the life model. She can find other ways of painting human subjects. Yes, and just to go back to your question, Malvin, I think really she was enabled. And I think we can't forget, it's not just the fact that she had money and that she was in the right place at the right time. She had an incredibly supportive family. And again, to go back to her mother, this interfering figure, Without Marie Connolly, none of this would have happened.

Her mother organised these painting classes. I mean, how many times did she take her per week? Was it three times taking the daughter's three hours a week, across Paris multiple times, paying for these lessons, and then insisting on her success. Her mother wanted her to succeed. So, you know, I don't think, I think it's this large group of people who enabled her to go back to the, you know,

I know she was, she was very determined, but she was helped along the way. Well, thank you all very much. That's terrific. And here comes our producer. Would you all like tea or coffee? Oh, I'd love to me. I'm fine with my water, thank you. Tea would be lovely.

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