Berthe Morisot

Morisot outsold Monet, Renoir, and Sisley at the 1875 Hotel Drouot auction. Her Interior fetched 480 francs, the highest price of the sale. Her death certificate listed her profession as none.

She was born in Bourges in 1841. Her parents built a studio in the family garden for Berthe and her sister Edma, who was equally talented. Edma abandoned painting when she married a naval officer in 1869. Berthe, having lost her collaborator, held on harder. She exhibited ten works at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, the only woman showing. She participated in every Impressionist show except 1879, the year her daughter Julie was born.

Edouard Manet painted her portrait repeatedly before she married his brother Eugene in 1874. She had sworn to stay single. Eugene gave up his own painting ambitions so she could pursue hers. Whatever the nature of her relationship with Edouard, it produced some of his finest portraits and left a subject that art historians have been circling for over a century.

She painted the domestic world of women with a directness that the male Impressionists could not access: mothers and daughters, women at their toilette, the garden, the drawing room. The brushwork is rapid and unfinished-looking, more so than Monet's. She died of pneumonia in 1895, aged fifty-four, caught while nursing her daughter through the same illness. She wrote to sixteen-year-old Julie the day before.