Berthe Morisot, Manet’s
sister-in-law, made a charmingly delicate contribution to Impressionism.
Her solid bourgeois background did not prevent her from measuring her
talent as a painter against those of brilliant teachers and friends. Her
artistic development is determined by Corot at the beginning, by Manet
in her middle period – he too was torn between bourgeois
respectability and the life of art – and by Renoir in her later years.
The theme of her work is the human being in his intimate milieu of
family, house and garden. The freedom and the lightness of her lively
brushwork invest this narrow world with the relaxed atmosphere of
Impressionism. Fearing to dissolve objects too much in the play of
light, at the end of the 80s she began to subject her brush to more
formal control. An example of this is the portrait of Madame Sermicoli
on the chaise longue, done in 1889.
Stiftung Sammlung E.G. Bührle. Alle
Rechte vorbehalten
|
