Manet and Berthe Morisot: Portraits and Artistic Exchange

In Manet’s portraits, Berthe Morisot can seem extraordinarily close: a face above black clothes, a figure seated at a balcony, a familiar presence reconsidered from one canvas to another. Her own paintings open a different view of that presence. Water breaks into coloured strokes, figures share the movement of their surroundings, and an apparently casual scene becomes an experiment in how much paint can suggest.

Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot were friends and fellow painters. She posed for him, and both collected one another’s work. Their relationship later became a family connection, too. Following the pictures in both directions reveals an exchange that continued beyond her years as his sitter.^[1]

An Artist before the Portraits

Morisot arrived in Manet’s circle with a working life already under way. She and her sister Edma had trained as painters and exhibited at the Salon from 1864. Their family provided a setting for artistic discussion, bringing painters into contact with musicians and writers. The Musée d’Orsay’s account of this environment places conversation about art and politics within the sisters’ everyday experience.^[2]

The meeting with Manet in 1868 brought together people with shared interests and different degrees of public recognition. He already had the reputation associated with Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. She had her own pictures to make, submit and judge. Fantin-Latour’s introduction opened a more immediate connection between their practices.^[2][3]

This chronology changes how the portraits can be approached. The woman who poses is also someone accustomed to deciding where a figure should sit within a rectangle, how a dark passage should meet a light one, and when a picture might be ready to show. We cannot recover each discussion from a painted face. We can, however, recognise that the sitter brought an artist’s experience into the room.

Her presence also links two kinds of activity that are often considered separately: making a picture and sustaining the social world in which pictures are discussed. Sittings, visits and the exchange of works gave the artists repeated occasions to encounter each other’s decisions. Their paintings allow us to follow some of those encounters through objects that survive.

Sitting for Manet

In The Balcony, made in 1868–69 and exhibited at the Salon in 1869, Morisot occupies the foreground of a group. The green railing establishes a boundary between the figures and the viewer; the interior behind them introduces another degree of distance. Her place within this arrangement belongs to the picture’s construction of a modern social scene.^[6]

The format changes in Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, painted in 1872. The encounter contracts around head, hat and shoulders. Dark clothes spread across much of the canvas, while the face and a few small accents carry concentrated light and colour.^[7] The two pictures give a recurring sitter very different surroundings and different amounts of pictorial space.

The surviving Portrait de Berthe Morisot étendue, or Berthe Morisot Reclining, introduces a further change. The Musée Marmottan Monet dates it to 1873 and records that Manet cut down a larger reclining portrait, leaving the bust. The painting was a gift that remained within the family.^[3] Its reduced format records an act of revision as well as a likeness.

Together, these works show how familiarity could support variation. A group painting requires a figure to hold her place among other people and architectural forms. A small portrait can make the head dominate everything around it. Cutting a larger canvas changes the relation between person and setting again. Returning to Morisot gave Manet opportunities to test these different demands.

The portraits also invite questions about what they leave outside their frames. They offer compelling images of Morisot, but her work as a painter has to be encountered in her own canvases. Looking between the two bodies of work gives the exchange a scale that no single portrait can supply.

Advice at the Easel

One episode brings their working relationship into unusually concrete focus. Morisot painted The Mother and Sister of the Artist in 1869–70, showing her mother and Edma. As the deadline for the 1870 Salon approached, she asked Manet for advice. According to the National Gallery of Art’s account of her correspondence, his response extended into substantial repainting of the mother’s figure.^[8]

The episode makes the distinction between advice and intervention tangible. A comment leaves the painter to decide how it should affect the work. Another person taking up the brush puts that decision directly onto the canvas. The resulting picture carries traces of a professional encounter within an intimate family subject.

The National Gallery of Art distinguishes Manet’s abbreviated treatment of the mother from Morisot’s handling of Edma and the surrounding furnishings. The painting was exhibited at the Salon in 1870.^[8] It continued into public life as Morisot’s work, with the intervention forming part of its making history.

That history gives a more complicated sense of artistic assistance than a simple story of instruction. A painter seeking another’s judgement can value the exchange while still confronting the consequences of another hand. The event belongs to a particular picture and moment; it need not define the whole relationship. Later works allow us to see Morisot’s own decisions becoming a point of reference for Manet.

A Painting Given to Manet

The exchange also took the form of ownership. Morisot’s The Harbor at Lorient, painted in 1869, entered Manet’s collection as a gift from the artist that same year. The National Gallery of Art records this at the beginning of the painting’s provenance.^[9] The Art Institute of Chicago’s account adds that she gave it to him after he praised it.^[10]

A gift of this kind carries something different from a sitter’s likeness. Manet received a painting Morisot had made: an object through which her choices of subject, arrangement and touch could be encountered again. The act places her work within his artistic environment and gives their friendship a material history beyond the portraits.

The dates are useful. The harbour picture belongs to 1869, several years before the boating scenes that later make such an illuminating comparison. Morisot’s engagement with water and the life around it was already part of the exchange. The Art Institute situates her marine painting within a wider dialogue about light and reflective surfaces involving Manet and Claude Monet.^[10]

Two Decisions in 1874

In 1874, Morisot married Eugène Manet, Édouard’s brother. The family connection grew from an artistic friendship that was already several years old. The same year, she participated in the first exhibition of the group that became known as the Impressionists.^[2]

Édouard made a different exhibition choice. He declined to join that first group show, while his painting increasingly engaged with the bright palette and broken handling associated with its participants.^[4] The distinction matters because an exhibition and a way of painting are related forms of commitment, each with its own consequences.

The first concerns where and alongside whom work is seen. The second develops through the decisions made on the canvas: which subject to choose, how to arrange it, and what sort of touch can make it convincing. The two artists could move closer in their handling of paint while taking different routes into public view.

Manet’s Boating

Manet’s Boating is dated 1874 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows a man dressed in white and a woman in a striped dress, seated in a sailboat. The museum tentatively identifies the man as Rodolphe Leenhoff, Manet’s brother-in-law; the woman’s identity remains uncertain. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1879.^[4]

The picture offers an immediate impression of bright weather and proximity. The boat reaches the edges of the canvas, its curved stern rising around the woman at the left. The man’s white trousers and shirt create a large connected light shape against the blue-green water. His arms turn across the dark interior, bringing the activity of steering into the centre of the arrangement.

Above and to the right, a cropped sail and a taut diagonal rope make the space feel sharply divided. The sail points into the scene from beyond its boundary. The rope crosses a relatively open expanse of water, giving a slender line considerable authority. Much of the setting is established through these few large relations.

The woman introduces another rhythm. Her dress contains numerous blue and pale stripes, broken and redirected as the fabric moves across her body. The hat gathers a smaller group of light shapes and dark ribbons around her profile. Against the man’s broad white clothing, these passages make the handling of paint more conspicuous.

The apparent directness of the scene conceals a longer process. Heather Lemonedes Brown describes Manet continuing to revise Boating after beginning it in 1874, before showing it in his studio in 1876. Her account of technical examination reports that the woman was added during the composition’s development and that the sail and rope changed.^[1] The painting’s freshness was something worked towards across revisions.

Morisot’s Summer’s Day

Morisot’s Summer’s Day, dated about 1879, also brings two figures close to the edge of a boat. Its smaller canvas has more elongated horizontal proportions, measuring 45.7 × 75.2 cm, compared with Boating at 97.2 × 130.2 cm. It belongs to the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest at the National Gallery, London, in partnership with Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.^[4][5]

Here two women sit beside each other. One faces towards us; the other appears in profile at the left. A band of warm ochre wood cuts diagonally across the foreground, while the near edge of the boat passes out of view. The people feel close enough for us to share their limited space.

The water occupies much of the picture, but its surface differs strikingly from Manet’s. Pale lilac, blue and green form an interlocking field of marks. Small groups of dark and light strokes gather into ducks at the right. Near the upper edge, the distant shore appears as a narrow, shifting boundary rather than a broad landscape opening behind the figures.

Morisot distributes this activity through the clothes, too. The pale grey dress of the frontal figure contains blue and warmer strokes that turn across the bodice and skirt. Dark gloves provide a brief concentration near the hands. At the left, the other woman’s blue clothing deepens the colour without becoming a completely separate kind of surface.

The National Gallery considers it almost certain that the picture appeared at the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880 as The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne. It also suggests that the women may have been professional models. Although a related watercolour was probably made on site, the oil was likely completed at least partly in the studio.^[5] The liveliness of its marks need not mean that the whole canvas was finished beside the lake in a single encounter.

Looking between the Two Paintings

The shared arrangement makes differences easier to follow. Both pictures place a nearly frontal figure beside a profile, and both let a boat continue beyond the frame. Manet raises his man in white into a commanding position. Morisot brings the women nearer to the same level, allowing their hats, shoulders and surrounding water to establish a more continuous band across the canvas.

Manet’s large shapes keep their authority as we move away. The white figure, dark wooden interior, blue water and pale sail remain readily distinguishable. In Morisot’s picture, stepping back gathers the figures into view, while moving closer disperses parts of them into strokes that resemble those around them. Clothing and water repeatedly exchange our attention.

The contrast becomes particularly interesting in the areas of broken paint. Manet’s striped dress loosens the surface within an otherwise strongly divided arrangement. Morisot spreads comparable activity more widely, making it a means of joining parts of the picture. Her ducks, reflected light and grey dress are legible through different groupings of an equally visible painted touch.

Brown argues that Manet was responding to Morisot’s colour, subjects and handling by the mid-1870s, and sees an affinity with her touch in the striped dress of Boating.^[1] Summer’s Day offers a later example of the freedom her own work could achieve. Its date places it after the beginning of Manet’s picture, so the comparison follows a developing exchange across time.

There is pleasure in returning to the foregrounds. Manet lets the woman’s dress spread towards the lower edge, where its stripes turn into small, irregular touches. Morisot places a long blue folded object across pale fabric and lets the ochre boat edge run away beneath it. In each picture, ordinary objects become a way to move the eye across paint. The artists share that interest while giving the movement a different pace.