Berthe Morisot, Dulwich Picture Gallery review — secrets and revelations from a female Impressionist

Berthe Morisot, extraordinarily a footnote in Impressionist history until a decade ago, arrives at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery for her first UK exhibition in 70 years. It’s a wonderfully sympathetic, intelligent, enlightening show, placing Morisot at the heart of French painting while allowing her individuality to shine.

No major 19th-century French painter ventured works as loose and free as Morisot’s. The portraits of her daughter and sister especially have a freshness, dash and slack that call to mind contemporary laconic figuration such as Peter Doig’s or Chantal Joffe’s, and are riveting.

The blurry grace of “Julie Manet and her Greyhound Laertes”, the flame-haired teenager and dog as streamlined shapes dissolving into a rose-blue interior; the child in feather-light frock swinging on a branch among the white and green flurried marks of “In the Apple Tree”; her fierce little face and clenched fist raised above the liquid splendour of rippling water in a blue Chinese porcelain bowl in “Children with a Basin”: these are bravura paintings which feel slightly breathless — yet underlying the effect are masterly control of composition and careful nuance.

If Morisot intensely evokes her domestic domain, the framework is often wider, suggesting the ebb and flow between the private and the external worlds. In “Young Woman Watering a Shrub”, we follow from the back Morisot’s sister Edma, her housecoat whipped by the wind, crossing a terrace of plants and railings; beyond surge the walls, roofs, bridges of the Paris cityscape. In “Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight”, painted on Morisot’s honeymoon, her husband surveys a seascape through a dazzle of fluttering layers — lace curtains, glass, window-boxes, fencing, a frieze of passing figures on the foreshore. The entire painting seems to bob up and down uncertainly, spatial ambiguity perhaps a metaphor for the newly-wed Morisot’s unease.

In love with the married Édouard Manet, she accepted his adoring brother as a consolation. He devoted himself to her art and gave her nervous temperament some stability, but, as she wrote, “if I were sitting on the jetty at Dover and he at Calais, we couldn’t be further from one another. There is between us a small channel of the sea, a whole ocean squeezed in a terribly deep narrow passage.”

Outwardly, their home on the rue de Villejust was, Renoir remembered, “one of the most authentic centres of civilised Paris life”, and that refinement is in the paintings — “At the Ball” features her own exquisite fan, also on show. But tensions between what to reveal, what to conceal, animate everything.

In “The Psyche Mirror”, a woman ties her blouse at the back, the sort of boudoir scene Manet enjoyed painting, but here de-eroticised into a drama of light and reflection in a rich tonal range of whites. Incongruously set in a park, “Young Woman in a Ballgown” is a continuum of flowers, greenery, the flower-encrusted dress of a model who looks aside, engrossed in thought rather than on display.

“Mme Berthe Morisot is French by distinction, elegance, cheerfulness, carelessness,” wrote collector Charles Ephrussi. “She grinds flower petals on her palette, to then spread them on the canvas in witty, breathy touches, thrown a little at random.”

“Woman at Her Toilette”, painted in Morisot’s bedroom, allows us only to glimpse the model’s neck and the back of her head, while in the mirror are visible objects used to create her public persona: powder puff, crystal jar, flowers. Varied textures — flesh, satin, floral wallpaper — blend in creamy harmonies. A virtuoso Impressionist rendering of atmosphere — the critic Gustave Geffroy said Morisot fixed “the play of colours, the quivering between things and the air that envelops them” — it is also a statement of art’s conscious artifice: paint creates an image, just as make-up and fashion do.

Morisot exhibited at nearly all the Impressionist exhibitions, but her route there differed from the sensationalising impulse of her male colleagues. Unlike them, she had shown successfully at the academic salons, and was on friendly terms with her teacher, landscapist Camille Corot, implacable enemy of the Impressionists. She admired Corot’s “silver scrawls”, recalled here in the diaphanous pale grey scribbled strokes suggesting a dress in “Reclining Woman in Grey” and in reflections in a pond of the girls in a boat in “Summer’s Day”.

But from the start she loved to work outdoors, quickly — an Impressionist affinity. “Summer’s Day” and its companion “In the Bois de Boulogne” were painted in a single morning, beginning at 6am to avoid onlookers curious about why an affluent society woman was perched with her palette on the grass in a public park. The iridescent “The Fable” places Julie in the family garden, roses, trellises, bench delineated in broad slashes, yet with delicate touches — the white of the tunic beautifully fused with blues, pinks, purples cast by the shadows. Impressionist painting staked its faith on catching the fleeting moment; for Morisot, focused on Julie, “wanting to capture something of what goes by, just something, the smallest thing” of youth’s transience was predominant.

Not needing to sell liberated Morisot from compromising with public demands for “finish” which plagued the Impressionists. On the other hand, less determinedly radical, she could also explore continuities with 18th-century painting. Fragonard was an ancestor; contemporaries emphasised the link — Ephrussi praised her “fugitive frivolity . . . reminiscent of Fragonard” — and so does Dulwich, showing Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard alongside Morisot, and displaying some of her copies of rococo works. It’s an intriguing aspect, a change from the inevitable context of her friends Renoir, Monet, Degas, at the recent shows at Paris’s Musée Marmottan and Musée d’Orsay which brought her to prominence.

Before these exhibitions, Morisot was best known as subject of some dozen, psychologically gripping paintings by Manet. He never depicted her at work, however. Dulwich has borrowed her sole self-portrait, painted after his death; already grey, face somewhat worn, she eyes us with a direct, clear gaze, and swirling bold red and brown strokes loosely cohere into a palette and brush — an artist looking ahead to the painting of the future.

March 31-September 10, dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk