Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot was a French painter and printmaker of the nineteenth century, born Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot in Bourges on 14 January 1841. She belonged to the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists, and she died in Paris on 2 March 1895.

Besides painting, she worked as a draftsperson, an engraver and a lithographer. Among her best-known works are The Cradle, The Port at Lorient, The Psyche mirror and Eugène Manet on Isle of Wight.

Her paintings are held today by museums in many countries. They include the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Marmottan Monet, the National Gallery, Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Hiroshima Museum of Art, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Woman at Her Toilette, the painting shown here, dates from 1875–80 and was made in France. It is oil on canvas, 60.3 by 80.4 centimeters, painted in feathery strokes of lavender, pink, blue, white and gray. The Art Institute of Chicago observes that a woman at her toilette was a subject often painted by men of the period but seldom by the few women artists then at work, and that Morisot’s view of it is distinctly female, intimate but not eroticized.

She placed her signature along the bottom of the mirror, which the museum reads as a hint that the picture is as fleeting as a silvery reflection. The canvas came to the Art Institute of Chicago through the Stickney Fund and is in its department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe.