Morisot’s loose brushstrokes and abstracted forms transform an ordinary scene into a incredible work of Impressionist painting.
Berthe Morisot, Young Woman Watering a Shrub, 1876, oil on canvas, 40.01 x 31.75 cm (Mellon Collection, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond). Speakers: Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham, Assistant Curator of European Art and the Mellon Collections, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Dr. Steven Zucker
[music]
0:00:05.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, looking at a painting by my favorite Impressionist. This is Berthe Morisot, Young Woman Watering a Shrub. It dates to 1876, just two years after the first Impressionist exhibition.
0:00:22.4 Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham: So what we’re looking at is a painting of Morisot’s sister, Edma. We see her from behind. She’s watering a plant on the balcony of the family’s home in Paris, in a bourgeois neighborhood on the west side. We see her dressed in house clothes, so it’s a very intimate portrait.
0:00:39.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s so unusual. I was thinking hard to come up with images of people that filled the entire canvas, seen from behind, without even a profile of the face. Now, Degas does this in one of his images of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre. But here the reference comes from the 18th century, from the artist Watteau.
0:01:00.4 Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham: She saw these drawings that Watteau made of women from behind, that he used to incorporate into some of his Fête galante scenes. Many paintings throughout the history of art, we think of somebody like Friedrich’s Wanderer.
0:01:11.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: That’s a painting that is all about grandeur, and through the back of that figure, we the audience can take that in. This is so different. Here the figure is involved in this day-to-day activity, and yet Morisot is finding a kind of beauty and intimacy through this representation of the ordinary.
0:01:31.2 Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham: Edma, Morisot’s sister, is seen on the balcony, so it’s a tension between the familiarity of one’s home and the constant hustle and bustle and change of the city beyond, which is also what makes this painting very interesting when you think about the relationship between Morisot and her sister. They were introduced to art lessons as children by their parents, and they continued on with it, but in the late 1860s, Edma gets married. She has a baby. She and her husband move to Normandy. She puts down her brushes, and that’s the end of her art career. And so for Morisot, an activity that started with her sister, she finds herself all on her own, and she famously marries Eugène Manet, the brother of Édouard Manet, but instead of putting her brushes aside, she exhibits at every single Impressionist exhibition except for one, which happened at the same time as her daughter was born. She shows her works under her maiden name, Morisot, and so this is very much a painting that’s exhibiting a kind of choice that Morisot did not make.
0:02:22.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: For me, she is the bravest Impressionist, and that has to do with her willingness to allow for a kind of incredible abstraction in her forms, but it also speaks to her biography. When her mother arranged for her and her sister to take painting lessons, it was as was traditional for a 19th century bourgeois family, an amateur pursuit. But the two sisters took it very seriously and Morisot doubled down when her sister was married. And the result is some of the finest Impressionist paintings of the 19th century. These are the loosest of brush strokes, and with only a few variations of tone, she’s able to capture the turn and the motion of this figure. Here we see a white dress, but there’s almost no white paint here. These are cool grays and warm grays with just little touches of white.
0:03:13.6 Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham: I see something similar in the balcony where the black lines that are meant to signify the iron meld into the cityscape in the background along the horizon line, and it’s hard to tell what is the architecture of this immediate place that we’re in and what is the architecture that we’re seeing in the distance. Even as things like nude models and painting outdoors in the same way that some of her male colleagues did were not possible for her to do as a bourgeois woman, she’s still very much engaged in Impressionism and in the art scene in Paris at the time.
0:03:41.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: She’s figured out a way to produce something that is still within the domestic sphere, but is also outside and very much in the city. And the moment that she’s chosen seems to me to be a moment just after a light rain. The sky is, at first glance, white, although we can see some cool green blues and a little bit of a peach just around the head. All of that is accented by that wonderful green screen, which helps to frame, with the wrought iron, the figure in the center. The figure is pouring out of a pitcher into the shrub planted in a large porcelain, perhaps Japanese-inspired vessel, and it’s a reminder that the Impressionists in late 19th century France as a whole, was in love with Japanese art and culture.
0:04:29.2 Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham: This radical cropping of the screen on the side is a technique that the Impressionists learned from Japanese woodblock prints. And even as she is very interested in this Japanese pot, she renders it with quick Impressionist brushstrokes. The slick surfaces of the balcony where we can see the rain has just stopped, and also the overcast sky that’s starting to clear up. She achieves this through her use of wet on wet, adding colors over layers that have not yet dried, which is a technique that she learned from Manet.
0:04:57.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: When you compare this to Watteau’s originals, this is not sexualized. In fact, the dress hides the body. The foreshortening of the arms is not flattering, but there is a truth there and an intimacy there.
0:05:08.9 Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham: I think this is most clear in the way that she’s gathered the skirt up, holding it to the side. She doesn’t want it to get wet. Her shoes have a slight heel, so she’s navigating that. And the way that Morisot depicts the garment and her sister wearing it, you can get a sense that she’s both very familiar with the model, her sister, and what it would be like to be in this very same position.
0:05:26.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: She’s representing the momentary. The sister is distanced and caught in her own thoughts. It is this image of love, of intimacy, of tenderness, but one that is fleeting.
[music]
