Berthe Morisot

13 Oct, 2022 750 Painting

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the influential painters at the heart of the French Impressionist movement: Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). The men in her circle could freely paint in busy bars and public spaces, while Morisot captured the domestic world and found new, daring ways to paint quickly in the open air. Her work shows women as they were, to her: informal, unguarded, and not transformed or distorted for the eyes of men. The image above is one of her few self-portraits, though several portraits of her survive by other artists, chiefly her sister Edma and her brother-in-law Edouard Manet.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Tamar Garb No other episodes
    Professor of History of Art at University College London
  • Lois Oliver No other episodes
    Curator at the Royal Academy and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the American University of Notre Dame London
  • Claire Moran No other episodes
    Reader in French at Queen's University Belfast

Reading list

  • Berthe Morisot
    Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb (Phaidon, 1987) Google Books →
  • The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886
    Ruth Berson (Documentation. Vol. 1, Reviews, and vol. 2, Exhibited Works, San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996) Google Books →
  • Berthe Morisot, 1841-1895: catalogue raisonne de l'oeuvre peint
    Alain Clairet, Delphine Montalant and Yves Rouart (Montolivet: CERA-nrs, 1997) Google Books →
  • Perspectives on Morisot
    T.J. Edelstein (Hudson Press, 1990) Google Books →
  • Berthe Morisot's Images of Women
    Anne Higonnet (Harvard University Press, 1992) Google Books →
  • Berthe Morisot
    Anne Higonnet (University of California Press, 1995) Google Books →
  • Growing up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet
    Julie Manet (trans. Jane Roberts) (I.B.Tauris, 2017) Google Books →
  • Minor Intimacies and the Art of Berthe Morisot: Impressionism, Female Friendship and Spectatorship
    Claire Moran (Dix-Neuf, 25:2, 2021 )
  • The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot
    Berthe Morisot (ed. Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb) (Camden Press, 1987) Google Books →
  • Berthe Morisot: Impressionism and the Eighteenth Century
    Lois Oliver (exhibition catalogue, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2023 )
  • Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist
    Sylvie Patry (Rizzoli International Publications, 2018)
  • Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art
    Griselda Pollock (Routledge, 2003) Google Books →

Related episodes

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

Programme ID: m001cxwl

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001cxwl

Auto-category: 759.4 (French Impressionist painters)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, Berthe Morisot, 1841 to 1895, was an influential painter at the heart of the French Impressionist movement.