I think she was very influential in terms of the way in which she found, you know, because her work was not unknown. She was showing at all of these exhibitions. And she was selling well and her colleagues, Durga Manet, Monet, Renoir, they all admired her enormously. So I think we can point perhaps to how I would like to give an example. We have this wonderfully swift schemes of colour that she'll use to describe forms. And yet there's an absolute understanding of the form beneath that. And often a wonderful geometry to her paintings."
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.
With
Tamar Garb
Professor of History of Art at University College London
Lois Oliver
Curator at the Royal Academy and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the American University of Notre Dame London.
And
Claire Moran
Reader in French at Queen's University Belfast
Producer: Simon Tillotson