Illuminating: Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot In the Bois de Boulogne 1879, oil on canvas
I’m standing in the first room of this exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the light is shining off two absolutely captivating pictures: the first, of two young women sitting in a boat on lake, the second (In the Bois de Boulogne, above) of the same women in a park in the summer time.
What grabs me are the colours – soft bluey green, water and foliage, silver dancing on the lake and the odd bright dash of an orange flower – the movement, and the lightness. It’s a lightness of technique – quickly painted, with the brush strokes of an impressionist – but also of interpretation, capturing a moment where a young woman looks up, as we would today when someone calls our name and takes a picture on their phone. In the second picture, one woman is putting together a posy and there’s a flurry of movement that’s partly left to your imagination, as the viewer.
Other pictures are more formal portraits of young women in ball gowns, looking beautiful, but they too have that radiance, delicacy and lightness of touch. Morisot worked in oils but also pastels and red chalk, and demonstrates skilled draughtsmanship. The exhibition notes go to great pains to compare her to 18th century painters such as Fragonard and Boucher – yes, there is an influence, but was she also not painting in the style of her contemporaries, the Impressionists? To me, there is the undeniable influence of Degas, Renoir and Manet (her brother-in-law). Why can’t she be part of this group? I admit that I didn’t know Fragonard was a woman – her first name is Jean-Honoré – but there is no need to compare Morisot only to female artists. She stands in her own right, alongside the men.
I loved the concentration in some faces – the young woman painting, the children fishing, the nymphs embracing – amid the iridescent backgrounds of domestic interiors and mythical settings. So sad that she died at just 54. But she left a brief and beautiful, bright, light legacy.