Impressionism seems to brighten everyone’s mood – scenes of the bourgeois life – leisure life.

A picnic, a stroll in the park, a café luncheon, a racetrack, a frilly-dressed petite jeune fille, a twilight-lit dance, a sip of absinthe, a melting cathedral, a ballerina en pointe, and shimmering and dissolving water lilies find us staring and speechless. 

Reading faces, whether finding a likeness or studying a mood, seems challenging and contrary to Impressionism, but look closely at this painting. It is hard to resist wondering ….

This is by Berthe Morisot. The title is “Summer’s Day”.

Look again.

Peer; see into and beyond; decipher; describe; decode.

Two young women are in a boat. We are told in the title that it is summer. 

Who are they?

Where are they?

What day is it?

What year is it?

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (1841-1895) was a major figure in the Impressionist circle in Paris. She was a well respected artist, a contemporary and close friend of both Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

She was born in Bourges, France, into a well-off bourgeois family that moved to Paris when she was a child. She and her older sister, Edma, studied art under respectable local artists. They received traditional training in drawing and in copying works in the Louvre Museum. (Women were still not permitted as students into the Académie/Ecole des Beaux-Arts.) 

The sisters’ paintings were praised by Camille Corot, the foremost landscape painter of the plein-air school that slightly preceded Impressionism.

Edma married early. Berthe continued her career.

When she was 23 years old, Berthe had two landscapes accepted into the prestigious and juried 1864 Salon de Paris. In 1874 she met the brother of Edouard Manet, Eugene. (See “Luncheon on the Grass” in the first blog for his portrait.) They married in 1878 and had one daughter, Julie.

Her models, like the “other” female Impressionist, Mary Cassatt, were family and friends, female subjects for the most part. 

Take a look at the important details that she gives us, and her technique:

All of Impressionism is here – and more.

You see the expressively yet blurry touch of the brush that gives a fleeting quality to the pattern of the dress and also to the bouncing light on the shaded face. Color seems to dissolve in the atmosphere.

The hour changes. The weather changes. The boat drifts. The color and the light move. The next minute this scene is gone. Another group of trees, a single duck, a shift in posture, a different expression.

Unstable, incidental, momentary, and passing are all descriptions of Impressionism. 

Impressionism was a new storm – a rejection of the academic and classical formulas in realism and an invitation for the personal expression of no single style. The paintings were viewed by critics as “incomplete”, a sketch, or shattered surfaces of lost form dissolved in light, hence “a mere impression”. Instead, Impressionism opened the door for what we all consider “modern art”.

Berthe Morisot was able to capture this scene, this moment, or the memory of it.

Critics described her style as “lightly, or brushed against”.

You could say that she draws with paint, structure created by small and often unrelated gestures. She follows, although chronologically earlier, the philosophy of Claude Monet who told his students “if you see blue, paint a little blue”.

This leisurely scene, on a river or lake, is pastoral and quiet, with a fairly cool palette. We identify the water by the color, the reflection and the movement. We identify the forest by the tree trunks and the color. Distance is conveyed by a reduction in size, less detail, and a blurred vision. Unusual for the period is her use of cerulean blue, chrome yellow and emerald green, essential for her vivid greens in the landscape. These were new colors now available in the tubes that replace pigs’ bladders, making outdoor painting more possible.

There is no weakness here, only strength in the decisive and descriptive brush strokes of splintered color.

So – who is our central figure?

With whom is she making eye contact?

Us? an admirer, a boatman casting them off or reeling them in?

Or is she deep thought; introspective.

Just watchful?

Or…hesitant?

Withdrawn, or just poised? 

Anxious? Perhaps afraid of water?

What is revealed here?

Anything? 

What does the painting tell us about the relationship of the two women?

Are they sisters? Or friends? Or do they even know each other?

Is the figure on the left attempting to speak to our central figure, or is she looking over the side of the boat at the ducks?

Is there anyone else in the boat? Families, children, men?

Is it important to know?

What we do know is that, for a summer day, it is chilly. Although fashionable dress was the Victorian standard for an proper Parisian outing, the higher collars and long sleeves hint that it is a very cool day, although hats are need for shading the face. Our central figure has a muff (hand-warmer), and both hold a parasol, perhaps preparing for a long day on the lake and the possibility that the weather could change.

There is an unbalance quality to the scene. Why do we not see more of the figure on the left? She is incomplete.

Does this enhance your curiosity? It implies that there is more to the scene. “Who else is in the boat”? How large is the boat? Is this the beginning or the end of the excursion?

We know that the location is the lake of the Bois de Boulogne, the famous park in Paris. It is THE place to be and to be seen, particularly on a Sunday.

Today we are certainly aware of the popularity of the Impressionist style. But a critic in Le Figaro described the 1874 inaugural exhibition of the Impressionists as “five or six lunatics, of which one was a woman”.

The woman was Berthe.

“Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets“, 1872, 22×16, Musée d’Orsay, is one of seven paintings that her brother-in-law, Edouard Manet painted of her. His use of black (also seen in “Luncheon on the Grass”), was flat, demanding and controversial. In this painting Berthe is portrayed in a mourning dress after the death of her father. Later in her career, at a time when a black dress became the fashion (before Sargent’s “Madame X” or Chanel), she painted her own version of “Woman in Black” or “Before the Theatre”, 1875.

For the most part, however, Morisot’s palette was limited, her perspective (depth) conveyed through color and scale, using lots of white. She often worked on unprimed canvas that had a neutral tone so that the whites bounced whether cool or warm. Some paintings were a blend of watercolor, pastel and oil.

She carefully planned her compositions in advance so that she could have freedom once at the easel.

Berthe always exhibited under her maiden name, managing a lifetime career, motherhood and marriage. She outsold many of her Impressionist contemporaries, although suffered in notoriety because she was female.

Her husband, Eugene, also painted and was a lawyer but focused his efforts on supporting her career. He died in 1892.

Berthe died in 1895 at the age of 54 from pneumonia, after caring for her daughter with a similar ailment. 

Julie, her daughter, was orphaned at 16 and lived until 1966, age 88.

and a pre-impressionist portrait of Berthe’s mother and sister, Edma.

There is no mention of who the two young women in the boat are but “read the face” – the central figure must be Edma.