Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Portrait of Berthe Morisot, 1872, Lithograph, 8 x 5.25”, National Gallery of Art, Washington

This small lithograph, made by Edouard Manet in 1872, after an oil painting he had executed earlier in the year, depicts the artist Berthe Morisot - one of only two women who took part in the Impressionist Exhibitions from 1874 to 1886.

Edouard Manet was born in 1832 into a wealthy bourgeois Parisian family. His father was a lawyer, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Justice, his mother the daughter of a diplomat. Although his parents were keen for their son to join the French navy, Manet had other ideas. Having failed the entrance exam to the French Naval College, not once but twice (!), Manet was eventually allowed to pursue his great love of art by entering the studio of Thomas Couture – a French neo-classical artist who placed great emphasis on classical composition and, at the same time, valued spontaneity and freshness in his pupils' work. Their relationship was far from an easy one but the training he received in Couture’s studio certainly helped to make Manet the great artist he became.

In its economy of design and deftness of technique, this lithograph is a miniature masterpiece. Notice in how few lines Manet describes Morisot’s face, the silhouette of her extravagant hat and the shape of her shoulders and upper body. There is a lightness of touch in her rather distant anxious expression. She does not address us with her gaze. She appears to be unaware of our presence, instead looking absently out of the picture space. We wonder what or who she is thinking about. At the time that Manet was painting the oil portrait from which he made this lithograph, Morisot’s sister tells us that she was going through a particularly anguished time writing to her that “I’m sad as sad can be… I’m reading Darwin; hardly a woman’s book, still less a girl’s; what I see most clearly is that my state is unbearable from any point of view”. Such a comment begs the question who was Berthe Morisot and what was her relationship with Edouard Manet? Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was first introduced to Manet by the artist Fantin-Latour whilst she was sketching in the Louvre in 1867. Together with her mother and sister Edme, she was invited to attend the Thursday evening soirées held by Manet and his wife Suzanne in their Parisian home when, Suzanne, a fine concert pianist, would give an informal performance for her guests. The two families soon became close friends, meeting on a regular basis. In a letter to Fantin-Latour written in August 1868, Manet confided “I quite agree with you, the Mlles Morisot are charming. Too bad they’re not men. All the same, women as they are, they could serve the cause of painting by each marrying an academician, and bringing discord into the camp of the enemy!”. The enemy was the traditional French artistic establishment with whom Manet had a mercurial relationship and whose staid approach to art soon led to the formation of what became known as the Impressionists.

It is clear that the friendship between Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet developed into one of strong affection and artistic respect and Manet would go on to depict her more than he did any other woman. Intriguingly, in another lithograph (right) of a similar date, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, he portrays a rather different woman. Now, whilst we understand more about her hat, the ribbons around her neck and her dress, in contrast to the delicate expression of the first image, we see a strong woman who looks directly out at us, demanding our attention and that of the artist. Now we feel she may be engaged in conversation with Manet, perhaps arguing with him about technique, subject matter and new ways of painting.

Berthe Morisot’s first appearance in Manet’s canvases came in 1869 in a painting called Le Balcon, where she takes centre stage seated on a balcony overlooking a bustling Parisian boulevard. Her last was shortly before her marriage to Manet’s brother Eugene in 1874. Yet the relationship did not die and she went on to become an important influence in Manet’s adoption of a looser more impressionistic technique and his later interest in depicting scenes of Parisian café life, culminating in his iconic work A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.