Recreating the Colour Palette of Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was the only woman among the founding members of the Impressionists, and exhibited prominently in seven of the group’s eight exhibitions. In the era-defining First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, Morisot submitted The Cradle, a masterpiece in gestural sensitivity and a significant break from the traditions of formal Salon painting that dominated the period. Compared to her male counterparts, Morisot has often been unfairly overlooked as a key member of the Impressionists. However, she made brave strides both in the development of the Impressionist movement and for the future of women artists by deeply challenging convention. She even continued to use her maiden name after marriage, maintaining her professional identity and the established recognition she had built as an independent artist.

‘Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.’ – Berthe Morisot

The Life & Influences of Berthe Morisot

Morisot was born in 1841 into an upper-middle-class family and benefited from both financial security and a strong, independent character. She was well-educated in literature, music, and the social graces, and was considered beautiful and charming. She had every attribute at her disposal, including a natural flair for painting and drawing, and the support of her parents to pursue her artistic ambitions. However, she was unable to receive any formal training due to her gender. Unlike her male counterparts, she was not permitted to attend the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. But as was fashionable and considered appropriate for women of her social class, she was encouraged to study art and practice painting at home.

In 1890, Morisot wrote in a notebook about her struggles to be taken seriously as an artist:

‘I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that’s all I would have asked for, for I know I’m worth as much as they.’

Luckily, her artistically sympathetic parents built her and her sisters an art studio at home where they could train and learn under the private tutelage of the painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He took them to the Louvre, where they made studies of the Old Masters, and he taught them how to paint en plein air. He was a respected plein air painter himself, and these lessons would have a lasting influence on Morisot’s practice.

Morisot was a natural, and her characteristic style developed through her years of tutelage under Corot. In 1864, she exhibited her work for the first time at the highly esteemed Paris Salon, aged just 23, a remarkable achievement for a young woman during this period. She was listed as a student of Joseph Guichard and Achille-François Oudinot. She continued to have her work selected for the Salon six more times in total.

In 1868, Morisot met Édouard Manet, marking a turning point in her life. They shared a passion for painting and offered each other support and critique. She also sat for him and featured as a model in many of his paintings, whilst he reportedly hung three of her paintings in his bedroom. It has been suggested that they were lovers, but this has not been verified. Regardless of the nature of their personal relationship, it’s clear that they learnt significantly from each other artistically. Eventually, Morisot married Manet’s younger brother Eugène in 1874.

Eugène Manet was wholeheartedly supportive of Morisot’s artistic career. Known for his mild-mannered temperament, Eugène gave up his position at the Ministry of Defence and took a hands-on role in raising their only daughter, Julie, who was born in 1878. He became the only male model to appear in her paintings. However, women were the primary subject in Morisot’s work, and she captured them at all stages of life and in many domestic situations – from moments of contemplation to reading, dressing, and childcare.

Art historians have frequently commented on the overt femininity of Morisot’s style, calling it ‘intuitive’, ‘sensitive’, and even flirtatious. This falls short of recognising the weight of how radical her depictions of women actually were for their time. Likewise, painting the domestic interior was considered ‘low art’. But these were the situations and subjects that Morisot had access to. Her male counterparts, meanwhile, were not subject to the same social restrictions that women were. Middle and upper-class women were limited from visiting many types of spaces alone, and a male chaperone was expected to escort them when leaving their homes. Men were free to paint in busy boulevards, bustling cafes, and brothels, unlike women artists. But Morisot did not allow these limitations to hinder her practice; instead, she used her talents to bring scenes of domesticity into the realm of high art.

The Formation of The Impressionists

In 1874, Berthe’s submission to the traditional Paris Salon was rejected, and she would never submit work to the exhibition again. That same year, Berthe showed ten works at the First Impressionist Exhibition, notably being the only woman to participate. From this point onwards, Morisot became one of the primary members of the Impressionists, only missing one of their eight exhibitions in 1879, shortly after the birth of her daughter Julie.

That first breakout exhibition was held at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, the studio of the famous photographer Nadar. Frustrated by the restrictions of the official Salon system, the artists formed an independent cooperative. They chose to finance and exhibit on their own terms, bypassing establishments like the official Salon and the Salon des Refusés. The participating artists looked like a roll call of A-listers, and included highly influential artists like Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Béliard, Guillaumin, Lepic, Levert, and Rouart. The First Impressionist Exhibition debuted on 15 April 1874, with a 1 franc entrance fee. It opened two weeks before the Salon show and ran for one month. It had mixed reviews – some openly hostile. Although the exhibition was not a commercial success, it attracted considerable public attention and helped unite this pioneering group of artists around a shared purpose.

At the Edge of the Forest, above, was exhibited at the First Impressionist Exhibition, alongside On the Cliff, The Harbour at Lorient (pictured below), and Portrait of Madame Edma Pontillon, nee Edma Morisot, the sister of the artist. These works show the breadth of her skill using a variety of media, from watercolour and pastel to oils. In her plein air landscapes, she is experimenting with the effects of natural, direct light upon the female sitter, two important features of her work.

Art critic Charles Ephrussi comments on Morisot’s contribution to the 1880 Impressionist exhibition:

‘Berthe Morisot is French in her distinction, elegance, gaiety and nonchalance. She loves painting that is joyous and lively. She grinds flower petals onto her palette, in order to spread them later on her canvas with airy, witty touches, thrown a little haphazardly. These harmonise, blend and finish by producing something vital, fine and charming that you do not see, as much as intuit…all women are seen through fine grey tones, matt white and light pink, with no shadows, set off with little multi-coloured daubs, the whole giving the impression of vague opaline tints.’

The eighth, and final, Impressionist exhibition was held in May 1886 at 1 Rue Lafitte, in Paris. Organised primarily by Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, it featured 17 artists and marked a pivotal turning point in the history of art. The exhibition was entirely financed by Berthe Morisot, her husband Eugène Manet, and Edgar Degas. It is famous for the debut of Pointillism and Neo-Impressionism, with a dedicated room featuring work by Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Lucien Pissarro. Morisot exhibited her painting, The Bath, an intimate portrait that captures a fleeting, everyday moment with characteristic sensitivity and self-assured immediacy.

The final Impressionist exhibition also displayed Pointillist works like those of Georges Seurat. These were revolutionary at the time and led the way for the Neo-Impressionist Movement. Seurat used scientific research to create optical illusions with tiny dots of colour that when seen from a distance, were perceived as one single hue. The painter, known to be serious and meticulous, was determined to make his mark on the history of art and his inclusion in the exhibition signalled an important new direction for modern painting.

Edgar Degas exhibited The Tub alongside six other works, which were widely considered among the highlights of the exhibition. Although his intimate and unconventional depictions of women divided opinion, critics recognised his technical ability and distinctive approach to the female form. It is worth considering the differences in Degas and Morisot’s shared subject of a woman bathing. The viewer approaches Degas’s crouching bather from behind – her face is hidden and she remains anonymous, contributing to interpretations of the work as voyeuristic. Morisot’s bather, on the other hand, faces us directly and appears bold and unselfconscious. While both artists depict an intimate, everyday act, their differing viewpoints create a markedly contrasting relationship between the subject and the viewer.

Morisot was a vital driving force behind the Impressionists’ final exhibition and the movement as a whole. Through her work and financial support, she helped to create the conditions for the Modernists that followed.

Eugène Manet died in 1892, leaving Morisot to raise their daughter, Julie, alone. Just three years later, Morisot contracted pneumonia while nursing Julie through an illness and died on 2 March 1895, aged just 54. Julie was left orphaned at age 16. Morisot’s death ended an influential career that deeply challenged both the art establishment and the conventions imposed upon women during her time.

Berthe Morisot’s Painting Techniques

The way Morisot painted her female subjects was revolutionary for its time. They took centre stage in intimate poses and were given a sense of independence, rather than simply being objects for the viewer’s gaze. She documented the private spheres of bourgeois domestic life – flowers arranged in a vase, domestic scenes of family life, and mothers and children. She also painted maids and servants – giving us a glimpse into the other social classes of women who inhabited these spaces.

Typical of the Impressionist style, Morisot is known for avant-garde mark-making, rapid, visible brushwork, and for capturing fleeting light. Her painting technique is loose, uninhibited, yet economical, often using paint more thinly than her contemporaries. Her colour palette is soft and light, influenced by the Rococo palettes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Antoine Watteau. Although it is claimed that Morisot was related to Fragonard, this has not been historically verified, but Morisot did not deny the rumour. We have no doubt that she greatly admired the light-filled, delicate palettes of Rococo artists. She drew on this French tradition stylistically, but used her spontaneous, modern approach to play with the established conventions of the previous century.

Critics used the word effleurer to describe her style, meaning to ‘touch lightly’. She had an unparalleled ability for using white and pastel tones, as seen in The Cradle, 1872, where she cleverly filters the light through the gauze protecting baby Blanche, her niece. The composition is a masterclass in the diagonal division of the canvas from top right to bottom left, the contrast between dark and light creating an intimate scene of hush as the baby sleeps.

Summer’s Day, 1879, was painted en plein air at the Bois de Boulogne lake and captures two fashionable ladies in a rowing boat. Morisot had given birth to her daughter Julie just a year before and had spent much time by the lake observing the activities there, which inspired her to take up plein air painting again. She didn’t want to leave Julie at home with the nanny, so by taking her to the park, where she could paint (sometimes using models), she allowed herself to exist as both a painter and a mother – a radical notion at the time. Pigment analysis of this painting reveals the following colours, among others: Cobalt Blue, Viridian, Lead White, Cadmium Yellow, Chrome Yellow, Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre, and Vermilion.

We can see her use of rapid marks and sketch-like, speedy execution – possibly because she felt time-challenged with a baby in tow. She uses zigzagging, unblended brushstrokes, allowing the water to shimmer and capturing this particular moment in time – a core pillar of the Impressionist Movement. The painting was almost certainly exhibited with a different title, originally The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne at the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition in 1880, along with In the Bois de Boulogne (above). Both paintings feature the same women wearing identical clothes in the newly landscaped parkland, designed by Adolphe Alphand under Napoleon III’s reign. These works are typical Impressionist paintings of middle-class leisure.

Morisot often blurred the boundaries between figures and landscapes using delicate filigree marks and long, ribbon-like sweeps in multiple directions. In contrast, her en plein air colleague, Claude Monet, used short comma shapes using thick impasto paint. He was keen on using highly saturated primary colours, unlike her palette of cool, silvery tones dominated by luminous whites, lavender, cool greys, and pale pinks. Morisot treated white as an active, expressive colour in its own right. Unlike Monet’s method of layering distinct patches of pure colour side by side, Morisot practised a highly integrated wet-on-wet technique.

Around 1880, she began painting on unprimed canvas, pushing the limits of what 19th-century critics considered an acceptable ‘finished’ painting. She didn’t hesitate to leave portions of the raw canvas entirely exposed, deliberately leaving the edges of her canvas bare. This gave her work a breathing, vignette quality that beautifully emphasised the fleeting, transient nature of the moment. She mostly worked in oil paint, watercolours, charcoal, and pastel simultaneously, and even explored sculpture.

Morisot’s use of plein air techniques in an interior setting set her apart. She pioneered the ‘plein-air interior’ style, using the same methods of capturing fleeting weather to capture light passing through a window, reflections on a face, or a surface. By doing this, she was able to bring us closer to the emotions of her subjects and create a sense of true human connection.

Morisot’s mature career began in 1872. She found an audience for her work with Paul Durand-Ruel, the private dealer, who bought 22 of her paintings. In 1877, she was described by the critic for Le Temps as the ‘one real Impressionist in this group.’ In 1894, the art critic Gustave Geffroy described her as one of les trois grandes dames – the three great ladies – of Impressionism, alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.

In a rather touching tribute by her fellow Impressionists, her still-life Dahlias, painted in 1876, was posthumously exhibited in a memorial exhibition honouring her in 1895. Her legacy casts a long shadow for the female painters who came after her; such was her determination to create a level playing field for all. As one of the core founders of the Impressionist movement, she was a trailblazer in her passion and persistence for painting. Her gender in this process is almost irrelevant, except that she was such an original and driving force in the history of art and changed people’s perceptions of women at home for the better, elevating their status to something worthy and divine.

Berthe Morisot’s Colour Palette

Berthe Morisot used a palette that combined traditional pigments with the cutting-edge synthetic pigments emerging on the art materials market in the 19th century. Scientific analysis by the National Gallery in London on her painting Summer’s Day (1879) is a perfect example of the mixture of her synthetic and traditional pigment choices, some of which are unusual for an Impressionist painter.

Cerulean Blue (cobalt stannate), not often used at this time, as well as Cadmium Yellow, which was a new synthetic colour. Artificial Ultramarine, Viridian, Yellow Ochre, Vermilion, and Ivory Black all provided the traditional pigments that were widely used.

Palette One – Woman at Her Toilette, 1875

In this painting, we can clearly see that Morisot’s sketchy painting technique allows her to blur the boundaries between her subject and the mirror, creating a diffused, reflective effect. By obscuring the woman’s reflection, it can be interpreted as Morisot removing the assumption that women are vain. The artist often signed her name in unusual places on the canvas. Here, her signature can be seen at the base of the mirror – a highly personal detail signifying her ownership of this painting and individual connection to the subject.

Her palette of silvery lilac, pretty pinks, and pale blue is reminiscent of the 18th-century Rococo painters, but Morisot cleverly anchors it with earth-toned Umbers and Ivory Black. Many Impressionists steered away from Umbers and Siennas, but Morisot used them often to stain her canvas or as an underpainting. Notice here the Ivory Black neck ribbon and limited dark accents that bring structure to the painting.

Colours used: Ivory Black, Mixing White, Vermilion, Prussian Blue, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber. Vermilion can be replaced by Cadmium Red, a paint that was unavailable to Morisot at the time.

Palette Two – Peonies, 1869

Peonies is a beautiful, sketchy observation of a bunch of bountiful flowers. At first look, it feels like a pretty picture. Look more closely, however, and we can sense real character and a unique approach to still life painting. It’s a masterpiece of observation. Take a look at the quick sweep of pink paint that represents a fallen petal, the feathery brushstrokes of the leaves, and accents of Lead White used as highlights and reflections in the glass. She often uses a mixture of densities in her paint, from raw canvas, thin layers, to highly opaque and sometimes impasto marks. I particularly love the dark Umber scribbles at the base of the painting, which give it real energy.

Colours used: Viridian, Mixing White, Prussian Blue, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Vermilion or Cadmium Red. Morisot would have used Lead White, I have replaced it with Zinc White and Mixing White.

Palette Three – Girl in a Boat with Geese, 1889

What a joyous and typically Impressionist painting, with four geese taking centre stage in the foreground, while a young girl wrestles with her oars in the distance. Typical of the middle-class plein air subject matter of this group of painters, it illustrates the placement of marks and colours that are so distinctive of this movement. By introducing dark accents of Ivory Black in the background, she creates distance and perspective. The diagonal composition of the water creates movement as our eye moves along the painting plane. Notice the variety of colours that she uses in the reflective water to create depth and luminosity.

Colours used: Cadmium Yellow, Mixing White, Vermilion (or Cadmium Red), Prussian Blue, Ivory Black, Burnt Umber, Yellow Ochre, Viridian.

Further Reading

Recreating the Palette of Paula Modersohn-Becker

Naples Yellow in the Palette of Édouard Manet

Impressionist Painting Techniques

Recreating the Colour Palette of Edgar Degas

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