Inspired! by Berthe Morisot
Today I listened to a podcast from Katy Hessel interviewing curator Candy Kang about the life and work of Morisot.
Berthe Morisot was the only woman in the group of impressionists at the start. She was part of the first exhibition where the group called themselves 'impressionists' in 1877. She participated in all of the exhibitions except for the one in 1879 because she fell ill after giving birth to her daughter Julie.
Le Figaro critic Albert Wolff noted that the Impressionists consisted of "five or six lunatics of which one is a woman...
“Through her portrayal of the human figure, Morisot explored impressionist themes of modernity: the intimacy of contemporary bourgeois living and family life, the taste for resorts and gardens, the importance of fashion, and women’s domestic work. Deliberately sketchlike and unfinished in appearance, her works are not an unmediated reflection of her daily environment: they address the temporality of representation itself in a careful capture of the world that attempts to “fix something of the passing moment.” Exhibition note from the show Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist at the Barnes Foundation.
Below, a couple of Berthe’s watercolors. I’d love to know what she was thinking , painting the first one then rendering the looser, second version.
