Berthe Morisot. Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists.
She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of les trois grandes dames of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. In 1864, Morisot exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris.
Sponsored by the government and judged by Academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the rejected Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, which included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.
It was held at the studio of the photographer Nadar. Morisot was married to Eugène Manet, the brother of her friend and colleague Édouard Manet.
Morisot was born in Bourges, France, into an affluent bourgeois family. Her father, Edmé Tiburce Morisot, was the prefect of the department of Cher. He also studied architecture at École des Beaux Arts. Her mother, Marie-Joséphine-Cornélie Thomas, was the great-niece of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, one of the most prolific Rococo painters of the ancien régime. She had two older sisters, Yves and Edma, plus a younger brother, Tiburce, born in 1848. The family moved to Paris in 1852, wh