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Stuck in someone's frames? Click here to break out.
This page has not been updated since April 5, 2004, with two exceptions. So many of the links no longer work. The two exceptions were:
This page is intended to provide web links to the paintings that are mentioned in Dominique Bona's book "Berthe Morisot: La Secret de la Femme en Noir", published by Bernard Grasset, Paris, 2000. (The quotation above is from page 248.) The links are given in order of appearance within each chapter. (Click here for a photo of Berthe Morisot. She was born Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot 14 Jan 1841 and died of pneumonia 3 Mar 1895. The best collection of her paintings in a museum that I have seen is at the Musée Marmottan in Paris.) NOTE: I am NOT trying to compile an exhaustive list of every place on the web where each painting is. I give multiple references for some paintings, in case links go dead or because some of them have useful text with them.
In case you are wondering, I am not fluent in French. I studied 1 year of French reading, and so I am able to understand about 70% of what I read in Dominique Bona's book, without having to resort to a dictionary. But my spoken French is limited, and my written French is even worse.
The background for this page is an extreme enlargement of the area of Berthe Morisot's right cheek in her Brown self-portrait with Julie. The background is what makes this page slow to load.
A new (as of August 2002 when I found it) website does an excellent job of putting Berthe Morisot paintings in a single web site. So click here to see this site.
April 2004 Note: I have done little on this page since 2002. So many links are dead. At this time, I do not know when I will be able to do a thorough update, and right now I am just doing an update to add Tissot's engraving of Berthe Morisot.
Here is a quick way to jump to a particular chapter:
Chapter 2: L'atelier caché de Berthe
Meanwhile here are some link pages of multiple paintings by Berthe Morisot on the web
I regret that I do not yet have time to update the web page fully.
Chapter 1: L'enigme du bouquet de violettes
Chapter 3: Drôle de Bourgeoisie
Chapter 4: Trois soeurs sur la ligne de départ
Chapter 5: Le Louvre: entre le temple et la maison de rendez-vous
Chapters Yet to Come
The rest is yet to come ... someday.
And here are some of her paintings
And others
A distinguishing characteristic of Berthe Morisot's physical appearance in the last years of her life was that her formerly black hair had turned white. Some accounts claim that her hair had turned white "practically overnight" (Rosalind de Boland Roberts and Jane Roberts, on p. 20 of their introduction to Growing up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, Sotheby's Publications: 1987) as part of her reaction to the death on April 13, 1892 of her husband Eugène Manet. However, Berthe Morisot's correspondence makes it very clear that her hair turned white long before her husband's death. In her own words (p. 164 of the English translation of the correspondence, in the 1987 edition with the notes of Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb), Berthe Morisot wrote in a letter in 1888 to her friend Sophie Canat that "my hair is as white as snow, and my legs are a little stiff". So, by late 1888, at the age of 47 and about 3 years before her husband's death, her hair had turned white.
When considering this early white hair, as well as her early death at age 54, the question looms of what could have led to these early events. Her health had been frail, with significant illnesses. Could her paints have poisoned her through years of accumulations of small contacts with the metals in the paints? I'll leave that to someone else to figure out.
