150 years of Impressionism

In 1879, for the first time since joining the movement, the painter Berthe Morisot did not participate in the fourth Impressionist exhibition. She was recovering from the birth of her daughter, Julie, and was too ill to show her work. Her absence was felt.

Following the exhibition, her colleague, Mary Cassatt wrote her an encouraging letter: ‘I am so happy you have done so much work, you will reclaim your place at the exhibition with éclat (flair). I am very envious of your talent I assure you’.¹Mary Cassatt, Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, Abbeville Press, 1984, p. 149.

The 1879 exhibition proved to be a watershed moment in Cassatt’s career, with the American artist presenting a dozen works. Her letter to Morisot brims with frankness and collegiality. Cassatt went on to discuss her travels in Piedmont, Milan and Lake Maggiore; she said she would convince her father to buy ‘something of Monet’s’. At the end, it is signed, ‘Many kisses to Miss Julie and a thousand best wishes to her mother from their / Affectionate friend / Mary Cassatt’.

The letter, in its familiarity, may feel surprising. Cassatt and Morisot’s careers and impact have been resurrected over the past several decades, thanks to crucial feminist scholarship. They now headline exhibitions, and they may be, in fact, the two most well-known historic women artists. Yet as much as they are celebrated as individuals, we less often think about them together, that they likely found community in their shared endeavours. These were two women who knew each other, respected each other, and reassured each other, in a world where they had to fight to pursue their professional ambitions.

Both women came up against a deeply patriarchal society, where they would have been discouraged from professionalisation and barred from the training, opportunities and access granted to their male art peers. And yet, at the same time, they were embraced by the Impressionists artists themselves, championed and befriended by Edgar Degas and Eugène Manet. Cassatt and Morisot were in no way marginal; they, alongside Marie Bracquemond and Eva Gonzalès, were central to the development of Impressionism, first in France and then the world.

Morisot and Cassatt had different experiences than their male colleagues, but they exerted their influence and created a fuller view of what ‘modern’ life could encompass. They existed in a larger network and movement that already had a complicated relationship to gender and femininity – and they worked to redefine what those terms meant for their viewers. Their legacy is not only their own output, but the birth of Impressionism itself.

The 1860s were an exciting time to be an artist in Paris. Thousands of artists – men and women – ventured to Paris in the late nineteenth century, including almost two thousand Americans. Louise Breslau, a German Swiss artist, at one point proclaimed, ‘You will never understand what France is for us … It has proven that the woman artist has a motherland on this earth’.²Laurence Madeline et al, Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900, American Federation Of Arts in association with Yale University Press, New York, 2017, p. 16. Beyond the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which did not admit women, aspiring artists had every opportunity to see the Old Masters and the avant-garde, between the museums, salons and collectors. The city was alive with debates, many of which played out publicly in the latest literature and criticism, from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal to novels by Emile Zola.

The central debate – and what Cassatt, Morisot and their peers took up – was not whether the canon of art history should be studied, but how that training should be applied to the nineteenth century. Technical mastery was foundational for every single one of the Impressionists. It is why so many of them met while copying artworks at the Louvre. As University of Leeds art historian Griselda Pollock has argued, Mary Cassatt’s oeuvre meditates on ‘what painting could do and why it should rework the past rather than merely emulate it’.³Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women Thames & Hudson, London, 2022, p. 60. It was a shared appreciation for both past and present that allowed the Impressionists to engage with each other’s work, at a time when their deviation from convention was considered extremely provocative.

In its conception, the Impressionist movement was about a more egalitarian approach to art; art that would express the society in which they lived. Monet, Degas, Pissarro and their contemporaries documented their world, the people and places that they could access. Life was their subject matter: holidays and honeymoons, leisurely strolls in the garden, evenings at the theatre, passersby on the street – the new activities and freedoms available to the urban middle class. They experimented with their brushwork and painted en plein air, contending with the elements (sand, wind, rain!) and emphasising their spontaneous engagement with the canvas.

A relatively early work by Manet from around 1860, The ship’s deck, gestures to what Impressionism would become. In it, we are positioned unevenly on the deck. No narrative plays out; we are alone at the helm. The ship seems to ebb, as shadows wobble and brushstrokes reach undefined ends. The ship’s deck is not the modernist, urban view we expect from Manet, but it demonstrates the rapid strokes and the immediacy that he would develop further. In a just slightly later painting, Music in the Tuileries, 1862, Manet uses those same unfinished yet virtuosic brushstrokes to cultivate an atmosphere of bustling, intermingling conversations.

In these early stages, femininity was embedded in the movement’s wider perception – and not just due to the presence of women artists. In 1874, after the first exhibition of what was then called ‘the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc.,’ the critic Louis Leroy wrote a scathing review of what he saw as a rejection of technique. His satirical text takes the form of a dialogue, in which one speaker laments, ‘Oh, form! Oh, the masters! We don’t want them any more, my poor fellow! We’ve changed all that’.⁴‘Pictorial: Louis Leroy’s scathing review of the first exhibition of the Impressionists’, Arthive, 16 Dec. 2019, . The two speakers move between states of shock, bewilderment and outrage, describing the work as sloppy, maddening and criminal.

When Leroy famously claimed that Monet’s Impression, soleil levant, 1872, was an ‘impression indeed’, he was not only criticising the seemingly unfinished, unformed quality of the artwork, he was also drawing on a vocabulary largely associated with femininity. As another contemporary writer argued:

‘Properly speaking, only a woman has the right to practice the system of the Impressionists; she alone can restrict her efforts, translate her impressions, and mitigate superficiality by means of her incomparable charm, her sweetness and grace.’

‘Impression’ conveyed an ephemerality and frivolity that had long been connected to ideas of womanhood, whereas genius was an exclusively masculine domain.

Scholars such as University of London art historian Tamar Garb FBA have demonstrated that critics intentionally used a feminised word, so as to better dismiss the movement by association. Or, as the former curator at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Laurence Madeline has put it: ‘Impressionism = femininity = fear of the loss of virility in art – of the artist’s virility, and also that of the unwitting critic’.⁵Madeline et. al, p. 11 This logic does not entirely make sense to us now; what Madeline pinpoints is that there was an entirely different logic around art, viewing and gender that defined the context – and to an extent, the content – of these paintings. The so-called femininity inherent to the work signals the critics’ desire to reinforce the categories, definitions and hierarchies that were being actively blurred by the Impressionists. It was in this context that Morisot and Cassatt joined their colleagues.

After training with painters such as Joseph Guichard, Morisot had begun showing at the prestigious Salon de Paris in 1864. She first met Manet while she was copying work at the Louvre (also how Manet and Degas met), and in 1868, she joined the Impressionists. Her meeting with Manet signalled a shift not just in Morisot’s own aesthetic interests but in her self-image. Morisot’s biographers have stressed her struggle with self-doubt, particularly during this early period, despite showing at the Salon. Her introduction to Impressionism did not eliminate her anxieties, but it did strengthen her sense of purpose.

Cassatt had moved to Paris in 1865, after studying at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, private study with Jean-Léon Gérôme, and spending time in the great European collections. By 1867, Cassatt was already showing at the Salon, and in 1871, with the financial support of her parents, she opened her own studio. In 1877, Degas visited Cassatt and invited her to show with the Impressionists. She had admired his work for years (she allegedly once pushed her nose against a window to look at his pastels), and at this point, she recalled, ‘I began to live’.⁶ibid.

After their respective entrées, Morisot and Cassatt became completely embedded in the movement. That said, their importance and centrality should not be mistaken for equity. Around fifty men exhibited with the Impressionists, but only five women are recorded, two of whom used pseudonyms.

Morisot and Cassatt became part of the Impressionist inner circle on professional and personal levels. Morisot showed at seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, and while Cassatt showed less consistently, she would sometimes show as many as twenty works at once. Morisot married Manet’s brother, Edouard. As in all families, chosen or otherwise, the group could be supportive – and tumultuous. Manet and Degas’s friendship sometimes veered closer to a rivalry, and they eventually had a falling out. A friend of Cassatt’s referred to her many disputes with Degas as ‘spicy estrangements’.⁷Debra N. Mancoff, Mary Cassatt: Reflections of Women’s Lives, Harry N. Abrams, 1998, p. 14.

Morisot and Cassatt consistently diverged from their male colleagues in their subject matter. Where the male artists could be flâneurs, moving about the city as solitary observers, Morisot and Cassatt could not have gone backstage to the opera or the ballet. They could not have sat with a plum brandy or absinthe at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes. They should not have even painted outside without a chaperone. As unconventional as they were in their career choices, both women adhered to certain boundaries and social conventions in order to maintain their reputations and be taken seriously as artists. It is telling that the most famous images of Mary Cassatt are Degas’s depictions of her in the Louvre. Museums were a rare public space that men and women could share.

These restrictions became crucial backdrops to their work, in the sense that both women were thinking through what these barriers meant for them and meant for women, more broadly. Morisot was fascinated by liminal spaces and thresholds; she often placed her sitters before a window or an open door. These images, where the outside world is visible but inaccessible, evoke a profound sense of in-betweenness. They suggest that domesticity was not only about where women were (the home) but about the things they could not independently experience.

Even with these restrictions, the women and children in Morisot and Cassatt’s paintings radiate self-fulfilment. In her 1889 painting, Embroidery (La Broderie), Morisot shows a young woman and a girl embroidering a large textile with great concentration. They are absorbed in their task; a comfortable silence has fallen between them. In loose, painterly strokes, Morisot brushes them into an almost-dreamlike space; they are simultaneously designing, imagining and working.

Morisot’s Embroidery (La Broderie) entered the NGV Collection in 2022 through the generous support of Barry Janes and Paul Cross, Paula Fox AO and Fox Family Foundation, Norman Bloom and Pauline Bloom, Myriam Boisbouvier-Wylie and John Wylie AM, Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, The Bowden Marstan Foundation, Ken Harrison AM and Jill Harrison OAM, John and Rose Downer Foundation, Tim Fairfax AC and Gina Fairfax and donors to the 2021 NGV Foundation Annual Dinner and 2021 NGV Annual Appeal.

Cassatt, too, expertly painted women and children in the home, rejecting sentimentality and instead, contemplating labour and complex relationships. In a chalk and wash sketch of a young girl, we see her gaze off into the distance, clearly thinking about something that we cannot know, as her hands and feet shift aimlessly. Cassatt’s children and girls are interesting and full of promise. When she then places them in decorated interiors in her finished compositions, she questions why bourgeoise convention must, eventually, confine them.

In this way, both Cassatt and Morisot are masters at what Griselda Pollock has termed ‘psychological modernism’, or, the depiction of subjective interiority through visual signs.⁸Pollock, p. 39. They allow us to imagine the complete personhood of their subjects, though extremely subtle and complex renderings of space, gesture and interpersonal interaction.

As their male colleagues were elevating everyday experience to the realm of fine art, Cassatt and Morisot were elevating a feminine experience to the same level, visualising the thoughtfulness and creativity that they saw in their own lives. What that meant, then, was that they also changed what ‘modernity’ could mean. Modernity was not only the loose brushstrokes and immediacy of painting or the documentation of leisure activities in the late nineteenth century. It was not only coming-and-going in public spaces but the observation of and participation in a modern consciousness. Modernity was the ambivalence with which an artist could reproduce – and question – their everyday life and the restrictions that had, effectively, made them who they were.

Sarah Bochicchio is a writer focused on art, fashion, gender and the self.

The NGV warmly thanks supporters towards Berthe Morisot’s Embroidery (La Broderie) 1889: Barry Janes and Paul Cross, Paula Fox AO and Fox Family Foundation, Norman Bloom and Pauline Bloom, Myriam Boisbouvier-Wylie and John Wylie AM, Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, The Bowden Marstan Foundation, Ken Harrison AM and Jill Harrison OAM, John and Rose Downer Foundation, Tim Fairfax AC and Gina Fairfax and donors to the 2021 NGV Foundation Annual Dinner and 2021 NGV Annual Appeal.

This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, issue 48, September–October 2024.

Notes