Berthe Morisot's Images of Women

Like her colleagues - Cassatt, Degas, Monet and Renoir - Berthe Morisot sought to represent the experience of modern life, a project that for her entailed rethinking what it meant to be a woman in the 19th century. Through close attention to the artist's work and its context, Anne Higonnet shows how Morisot transformed her femininity and its visual culture into Impressionist paintings. Higonnet presents a clear picture of visual traditions that, though very much a part of Morisot's world and work, figure only marginally in art history. Amateur picture making - enormously popular among 19th-century women - and industrialized feminine imagery dominated by the fashion plate provided a background and context for Morisot's imagery. Focusing on formal choices - poses, composition, brushwork - Higonnet compares Morisot's images of women with those of Casatt, Degas and Manet. And she examines critical themes: Morisot's self-portraiture; her attempts, with Cassatt, at painting the female nude; and her pictorial explorations of the mother-daughter relationship.