Berthe Morisot

Drawings were an important part of Berthe Morisot’s artistic process, and she often chose to display her works on paper alongside her paintings. As Marianne Mathieu has written of the artist, ‘Throughout her short life, she took care to ensure that her drawings featured prominently in her exhibitions, as if to stress their importance in her work and her passion for graphic art...It is interesting to note that she was the only Impressionist to exhibit, at each edition, not only oil paintings but also watercolours, pastels and sometimes even drawings. Works on canvas and paper were shown together and championed with the same conviction.’ Morisot’s vibrant watercolours established her as a superb colourist, while her work in pastel was integral to the development of many of her figure paintings. Her drawings were acquired by a small group of enlightened collectors and connoisseurs, including Degas (who once proclaimed ‘[Morisot’s] drawings are superb, I value them just as highly as [her] paintings’) and the Impressionist patron Ernest Hoschédé, as well as the critics and art historians Arsène Houssaye, Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, Ernest Chesneau and Charles Ephrussi. 

Throughout her career Morisot worked extensively in watercolour, a medium she was particularly fond of, and which appealed to many contemporary critics and collectors. One review of her exhibition at the Galerie Boussod et Valadon in 1892 praised ‘above all, all those delicate watercolours, all those charming, light sketches of children, barely enhanced with pale blue and vermilion...’ The early 20th century critic and art historian Claude Roger-Marx placed Morisot’s watercolours, alongside those of Johan Barthold Jongkind, as ‘the most triumphant watercolours of impressionism; she is alert, fresh, light, diaphanous…the attitude and the gesture are unobtrusively fixed with the happy unawareness of the genius that laughs, without fear or fatigue, at the difficulties it ignores. Nowhere does Berthe Morisot appear more personal, more exquisite, and never, in fact, will there ever be so decisive an agreement, so close a correlation between the quality of the expeditious, instantaneous process, and the artist’s very nature, all in the first stroke.’ Some 240 watercolours by Morisot are known or recorded. 

According to Morisot’s daughter Julie Manet, this charming late watercolour, executed towards the end of the year 1894, depicts an unnamed, non-professional model who also posed for several other works by the artist, and who is here depicted in the dining room of Morisot’s apartment at 10 rue Weber, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. An earlier and much less finished watercolour sketch for the same composition is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and both it and the present sheet are closely related to a small painting by Morisot of the same date. 

A stylistically comparable watercolour by Morisot of the same approximate date, and possibly depicting the same sitter, is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while also similar is a watercolour of a seated Jeanne Pontillon of c.1893, in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The present sheet was included in the recent exhibition 'Berthe Morisot: Pittrice Impressionista' at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin in 2024-2025. As Denis Rouart has noted of such works as this, ‘Pure in line, strong and solid, these drawings of young women and children in the fields, gardens or interiors of their homes, are a hymn to grace, as is all of Berthe Morisot’s work.’