Manet & Morisot 

(Detail) Édouard Manet, Le Balcon, 1868–1869, Oil on canvas, 170 x 125 cm., Musée d’Orsay © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Sylvie Chan-Liat

Join Emily Beeny, Chief Curator of the Legion of Honor and originating curator of the exhibition Manet & Morisot, for an exploration of the friendship and artistic exchange between Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. Unfolding over roughly fifteen years—between 1868 and 1883—theirs was the closest relationship between any two members of the Impressionist circle. Seen side by side, their paintings trace the evolution of a singular friendship by turns collaborative and competitive, playful and charged, lit by an enduring mutual sympathy and a shared desire to make art new.

Manet and Morisot were quite different painters and people, resulting in a fascinating dynamic in their personal and professional worlds. Where he was all charm and wit, open to the world in ways then possible only for a man of his elevated social class, Morisot was admired for her formidable reserve, her discrete elegance and intelligence: the corresponding virtues of a nineteenth-century bourgeois lady. The pleasures of Manet’s art lie in its indelible graphic power, its dialogue with the old masters, its joyous, outsized ambition. The pleasures of Morisot’s are subtler ones of light and surface, of images that seem to shimmer with the possibility of their own disappearance. Manet was essentially a studio painter, producing pictures he hoped would look dashed off “at the first go,” only through protracted revision. By contrast, Morisot was trained almost from the beginning as a plein-air landscape painter, capable of swift, decisive work under changing conditions of weather and light. Learn more about this celebrated artistic friendship and by extension, the history of modern art.