Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets

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Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets: Edouard Manet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Edouard Manet Oil Painting - Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets

Keywords: Berthe, Morisot, Bouquet, Violets

Work Overview: Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets
French: Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes
Artist Édouard Manet
Year 1872
Medium Oil on canvas
Subject Berthe Morisot
Dimensions 55.5 cm × 40.5 cm (21.9 in × 15.9 in)
Location Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (French: Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes) is an 1872 oil painting by Édouard Manet. It depicts fellow painter Berthe Morisot dressed in black mourning dress, with a barely visible bouquet of violets. The painting, sometimes known as Portrait of Berthe Morisot, Berthe Morisot in a black hat or Young woman in a black hat, is in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Manet also created an etching and two lithographs of the same composition.

Manet became acquainted with Berthe Morisot in 1868. She was the grand-niece of Fragonard, and also a painter; Morisot and Manet influenced each other's work. He painted her portrait many times, including his earlier work The Balcony. She married Manet's brother Eugène in 1874.

Manet had remained in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War 1870-71, and served in the Garde Nationale to defend the city in the Siege of Paris. He was unable to paint while he was serving, and left Paris after the city surrendered at the end of January 1871. He returned to painting later in 1871, and returned to Paris after the defeat of the Paris Commune in May 1871.

This painting was one of several portraits of a black-clad Morisot by Manet in 1872-74: others show her with a pink shoe, with a fan, and veiled.

The half-length portrait is on a canvas measuring 55.5 × 40.5 centimetres (21.9 × 15.9 in)[1] — 71.5 × 57.5 centimetres (28.1 × 22.6 in) with frame[1] — and is signed "Manet 72" in the upper right corner. It is a study in shades of black. Unusually for Manet's portraits, which typically have an even light, Morisot is lit from one side, so that she is brightly illuminated on her right side and the left is in deep shadow. She wears black mourning dress and hat, with her face surrounded by black ribbons and scarves, against a lighter background, and an earring in each ear. The violet flowers are barely perceptible where the neckline of Morisot's dress dips towards her chest. Manet also painted violets in his Woman with a Parrot of 1866.

Manet painted Morisot with black eyes, although her eyes were actually green. The dark costume and eyes may allude to Manet's impression that she looked Spanish. Manet had earlier painted a similar portrait of his own mother in mourning, made in 1863, which shows his mother clad in black, on a dark background.

The painting was followed by a similar etching - probably the first copy, with the pose reversed - and two lithographs, all made in 1872 to 1874. Manet made a similar painting of Morisot in mourning dress in 1874, after the death of her father, Edmé Tiburce Morisot.

The work was quickly considered a masterpiece of Manet's work. It was praised by Paul Valéry in the catalogue of Manet's retrospective at the Orangerie in 1932 for the centenary of his birth. Valéry knew the painting well: he was married to Morisot's niece, Jeannie Gobillard, the daughter of Morisot's sister Yves and her husband Theodore Gobillard, and so he also related by marriage to Manet; indeed, his wedding in 1900 was a double celebration at the same time as the marriage of Morisot's daughter Julie Manet to Ernest Rouart. Valéry compared Manet's painting to Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring: "I do not rank anything in Manet's work higher than a certain portrait of Berthe Morisot dated 1872".

Manet sold or gave the painting to collector and art critic Théodore Duret. Morisot herself acquired the painting in 1894, paying 5,100 francs in the sale of Duret's collection. After her death in 1895, it was kept by her daughter Julie until her own death in 1966, and then it was in the collection of her son (Morisot's grandson) Clément Rouart. It was acquired for the Musée d'Orsay in 1998, with funding from the Fonds du Patrimoine, the Meyer Foundation, the China Times Group and a sponsorship programme coordinated by the Japanese The Nikkei newspaper.

Manet was profoundly marked by the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, throughout which he had remained in Paris, serving in the garde nationale, and unable to paint. Towards the end of 1871, he resumed his work taking up his former models including Berthe Morisot, a young painter with whom he shared a deep friendship and who would marry one of his brothers a few months later.

Rather than using the uniform light he often employed in his portraits, Manet chose here to light his model vividly from the side so that Berthe Morisot's face seems to be all light and shadow. Here represented with black eyes (in fact they were green), she is dressed all in black, with a matching hat, no doubt better to enhance her "Spanish" beauty remarked on since her first appearance in Manet's work in 1869.

This sublime composition in blacks is yet another confirmation of Manet's virtuosity. But he may also have been using the work to impart a lesson to his young disciple, reminding her of the stunning possibilities of black at a time when her own painting was becoming lighter and lighter in tone as she followed the path to Impressionism.
This strange and spellbinding portrait was rapidly considered by his friends to be one of the artist's masterpieces. Paul Valery also praised it in his 1932 foreword to the catalogue of the Orangerie retrospective. "I do not rank anything in Manet's work higher than a certain portrait of Berthe Morisot dated 1872".

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