Berthe Morisot

In this *Cottage Interior* (or *Interior in Jersey*, the painting’s original title), the Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot depicts her eight-year-old daughter Julie in the house on the Channel Island where they spent the summer of 1886. In a letter to Claude Monet, Morisot described her adopted cottage as follows: ‘I have a bow window overlooking the sea and a garden that is nothing but a riot of flowers. You would work wonders with it!’ Morisot and her daughter are accompanied by Eugène Manet, Berthe’s husband and Julie’s father, depicted sitting in the blue armchair on the left in the preparatory pastel. In this final oil composition, the chair is empty, pushed back – Eugène seems to have just left the lunch table. Morisot focuses on the figure of her daughter, who has also risen from her wicker chair to stand by the bay window, more interested in her doll than in the view of the port of Gouray. Throughout her childhood, whether she was writing, reading, playing, etc., Julie often served as a model for Berthe Morisot, as well as for the painters in her circle, Edouard Manet (Eugène’s brother) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Exhibited at the Salon des XX in Brussels in 1887, this painting is representative of Berthe Morisot’s work, centred on her domestic surroundings and family life, at a time when her male colleagues in the Impressionist group were painting bars and grand boulevards. Whilst their subjects differ, modernity is just as striking in Morisot’s work, as she captures snapshots of her world in a highly personal manner through her painting. Whilst this is an intimate, moving portrayal of her daughter, Berthe Morisot also makes it an Impressionist manifesto, with its photographic framing, its broad, dynamic brushstrokes creating a spontaneous, sketched effect, and her focus on the atmosphere and the changing effects of light, flooding the room through the bay window, or filtered through the net curtains. The critic Gustave Geffroy comments: ‘the whole canvas glows with the great marine clarity outside’; one can almost feel the breeze blowing. What is also striking is the palette chosen by Morisot, which is both unified and nuanced, employing whites and blues with a freedom and richness that make this Interior a veritable ‘celebration of painting’. 

This translation has been automatically generated by DeepL.