Berthe Morisot’s brushwork is famously sloppy - or so it was thought to be by some of her critics. One of these, Paul de Charry, asked, “Why, given her undeniable talent, does she not take the trouble to finish her pictures?” I myself worried about this when I first encountered Morisot’s work. It seemed to me dashed off, too quick, and a little thoughtless, but now I realize I had not seen enough of Morisot’s work, a lacking that this exhibition has resolved for me.
Who Morisot most reminds me of is that other great Impressionist painter, Franz Hals. Or at least that’s how I’ve thought of him. Preceding the Impressionists by a couple hundred years, he yet was a master of the quick stroke, the few little lunges of paint, the seeming imprecision of his intentions that seem so Impressionist, and were so effective in the portraits he did of the not-always respectable Dutch burghers of the seventeenth century.
In a painting like Morisot’s “Eugéne Manet and His Daughter in the Garden” from 1883, the sunlight, the leaves, the grass, Manet’s jacket, his daughter’s dress - everything is caught in a brief moment of blurring, moving intensity that makes the piece almost jump in front of you. All of this is enabled by Morisot’s free, open brushwork, and she does it time and again in many, many paintings. This woman was an adventurer with real talent. “Excitement” is indeed now the word that I would use first to convey what her work offers to me.
Eva Carola Jeanne Emmanuela Antoinette Gonzalès was the daughter of a French writer of Spanish origin living in Paris, and his French wife. Eva was befriended as a young woman by Manet, and sat as a model for him several times. He followed her career closely, and in 1880, after she had gained considerable notoriety as a painter to watch, he wrote to her, “Every day the papers are full of your praise. Forgive me if I, too, find this gratifying - for you did after all seek my advice from time to time.” She died at the age of thirty-six, just after the birth of her son, Jean Raymond, and a week after Manet’s own passing.
Of the four artists in this exhibition, I cared for Gonzalès’s painting the least, but that’s not to say I did not care for her work at all. Often her paintings are very beautiful, but I don’t think the emotional depth the other three artists show so frequently exists to such a degree in Gonzalès’s pieces. There are levels of feeling in the work of Cassatt, Morisot, and Bracquemond that bear second and third looks all the time. I searched for that complexity in Gonzalès’s work — the depth of emotion, the complexity of expression — and was not able to find it as easily as I could with the others.
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