Berthe Morisot and the retrospective of 1896

Berthe Morisot died in Paris on 2 March 1895, at fifty four, after nursing her daughter through influenza and catching it herself. Her death certificate recorded no profession. She had shown in seven of the eight impressionist exhibitions, had been painting seriously for more than thirty years, and had sold steadily through Durand-Ruel, and the official record still described her as unemployed.

In March 1896 Durand-Ruel gave over his Paris gallery to a memorial exhibition of about three hundred of her works. It was organized by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir, with Stephane Mallarme writing the catalogue preface. Four men at the center of French painting spent months hanging a dead colleague's work. That fact is the single most useful thing to know about how her contemporaries actually rated her.

What the exhibition had to overcome

Almost everything she made stayed inside a small circle. She painted her sister, her daughter Julie, her garden and her rooms, because those were the subjects a woman of her class could reach without scandal, and much of the output went to family and friends rather than to the trade. A body of work distributed that way disappears quietly within a generation. Gathering three hundred pieces in one room was the only way to make the scale of it visible.

The critical response was respectful and slightly condescending, which was the standard tone for women painters at the time. Reviewers praised the lightness and the charm and said very little about the construction. What they missed is the thing that holds up best now: the unfinished edges, the bare canvas left showing, the way a figure dissolves at the boundary. Those were deliberate decisions and she made them earlier than most of the group.

Julie Manet, her daughter, was seventeen when the exhibition opened and had been left in the care of Mallarme. She kept a diary through those years that is now a primary source for the period, and she spent the rest of a long life managing her mother's reputation and placing works in public collections. A great deal of what museums hold today passed through her hands. Reputations of this kind are usually kept alive by one determined person.

• She exhibited in seven of the eight impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886
• Edouard Manet was her brother-in-law and she sat for several of his best known pictures
• Durand-Ruel handled her work during her life and hosted the memorial exhibition in 1896
• The 1896 show gathered roughly three hundred paintings, pastels, watercolors and drawings
• Mallarme wrote the preface and acted as guardian to her daughter Julie
• Julie Manet placed works in French public collections over the following decades

Her market took a long time to move and then moved sharply. For most of the twentieth century she was priced well below the men she exhibited with, and a good Morisot cost a fraction of a comparable Monet. That gap narrowed considerably from the 1990s onward as museums began mounting monographic exhibitions and as buyers noticed the supply was small. She worked slowly and did not live long, so there is not much of it.

How to look at the work

Start with the edges rather than the faces. In a strong Morisot the paint runs out before the form closes, and the picture holds together anyway because the drawing underneath is sound. Weak examples, usually late and hurried, simply look unfinished. The Musee d Orsay and the National Gallery of Art both hold good examples, and comparing two from the same decade makes the distinction obvious quickly.

I do not think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that is all I would have asked, for I know I am worth as much as they.

Berthe Morisot, from her notebooks

The 1896 exhibition did not make her famous. It did something more modest and more durable: it put a complete body of work in front of the people who write catalogues, and it left a printed record that later scholars could work from. Without that room, three hundred pictures spread across a hundred private houses would have taken far longer to find again.