Respectability and the Female Artist

Mary McAuliffe, Paris, City of Dreams:Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann,and the Creation of Paris, pp.109-111

    At midcentury, life for the  Parisian bourgeoisie -- especially for bourgeois women consisted of a predictable set of rules staunchly adhered to. Certainly the haute bourgeoisie

Berthe Morisot Photo
Berthe Morisot
 (upper middle class) family of Berthe Morisot, although more inclined towards the artistic than were other families of their station, had a conventional middle-class a attitude toward what they regarded as the essentials of life, including property, occupation, social status, manners, and – most especially – morality. . .

     Monsieur Morisot had harbored artistic inclinations as a youth and had hoped to become an architect, but yielding to bourgeois practicality, he had instead entered government service. . . The family, which included Berthe; her sisters, Yves and Edma; and their young brother, Tiburce, moved to what then were the western outskirts of Paris, in Passy.

     There, when Berthe was sixteen, Madame Morisot brought her three daughters to the painter Paul Charles Chocame-Moreau for lessons. Their brother, Tiburce, afterward wrote about this unfortunate introduction to art. To begin with, the portrait in the place of honor at the room’s center featured a young woman with elegant hairstyle who was, as the sisters noted, most surprisingly nude to the waist.. . .

     In any case, Chocame set the three Morisot sisters to work with lessons in crosshatching-calling to mind (this is Tiburce again) "the dreadful landscapes in the showcases of shops that sell funerary articles." What a wretched time they had in Chocame's studio, and how gloomy their trip was back to Passy, escorted by their father, who led the three sisters, "in cloaks, long skirts, and bonnets tied under the chin, a little flock reduced to a stupor by the Chocame instruction." . . .

     And that is the way it went, until Yves, the oldest sister, announced that if this was drawing, she would rather be a dressmaker.

     But Berthe and Edma persisted in prompting their mother to find a better teacher, and soon Madame Morisot removed them from the tutelage of Monsieur Chocarne and took them to the painter Joseph Guichard, who quickly realized his pupils' talent. Indeed, not only did he recognize it, he was alarmed by it. According to brother Tiburce, Guichard took Madame Morisot aside and warned her that, given her daughters' talent, his teaching would not simply give Berthe and Edma the amateur drawing-room accomplishments so admired of young ladies in that era; in fact, the sisters would become painters. "Do you realize what this means?" he demanded, sounding more than a little distraught. "In the upper-class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary, I might almost say catastrophic." In fact, he added, it would do no less than disrupt the "respectable and peaceful" Morisot home.

   Madame Morisot seemed to find him overly alarmist and, regardless of these warnings, told him to proceed. In that case, Guichard replied, he would apply for permission for the Morisot sisters to work in the Louvre, where he would give them face-to-face lessons with the masters.


   Berthe Morisot became a major Impressionist and exhibited at some of the group's exhibitions.

Morisot, Mother and Sister of the Artist

Berthe Morisot, The Mother and Sister of the Artist (1869/70)