Berthe Morisot was born in 1841 into a cultured bourgeois family in Bourges and became one of the founding members of the Impressionist movement — the only woman to participate in their first exhibition in 1874 and a regular exhibitor in seven of the eight group shows. Trained initially by Corot, who encouraged her to paint outdoors, she developed a style of extraordinary lightness and fluidity, applying paint in rapid, sketchy strokes that captured the play of light and atmosphere with an immediacy that rivalled Monet and Renoir.
Her subjects were drawn primarily from the world she knew best: the domestic sphere of upper-middle-class Parisian women. The Cradle (1872), showing her sister Edma watching over her sleeping infant, is one of the tenderest images in Impressionist art. Her paintings of women reading, dressing, tending gardens, and watching children are not merely genre scenes but subtle explorations of female experience, rendered with a freedom of touch and a sensitivity to light that place them among the finest achievements of the movement.
Morisot married Eugène Manet, the painter’s brother, in 1874, and her home became a gathering place for the Impressionist circle. Mallarmé, Degas, Renoir, and Monet were regular visitors. She continued to develop her art throughout her life, her late works increasingly bold in their dissolution of form. She died of pneumonia in 1895 at fifty-four, and the retrospective exhibition held the following year confirmed her central place in the Impressionist achievement.