Artifact World Gallery
Get the iOS app

The Mother and Sister of the Artist by Morisot, Berthe

Morisot, Berthe · 1869/1870

View the artwork: The Mother and Sister of the Artist →

Berthe Morisot painted her mother and her sister, Edma, in a Paris apartment in 1869. The painting is called The Mother and Sister of the Artist, and sometimes simply The Reading, and it hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The single most interesting thing about it may be that Edma, the young woman lost in thought on the left, was herself a serious painter. She exhibited at the Salon. And then she got married, moved to the provinces, and laid her brushes down for good.

Morisot stages the scene like a quiet collision. Two women, one book, zero interaction. The mother is bent into the page, absorbed. Edma sits beside her, face turned outward, eyes registering nothing in the room. The closed fan in her lap says everything: she isn't fanning, isn't reading, isn't doing. Where does a woman's mind go when she is expected to simply sit still? The violet bouquet behind her, violets were emblems of modesty and memory, sits near the idle sister, not the reader.

Morisot was 28 when she painted this. She had already shown at the Paris Salon and would soon help found what we now call Impressionism, the only woman in the original circle besides Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond. A critic later called them les trois grandes dames. She painted domestic interiors not because she lacked range but because those were the spaces she had unique access to. Working in loose, unblended strokes that feel like a held breath, she made those rooms as formally serious as any battlefield.

You can see what she learned from her friend Édouard Manet in the light falling across both faces, cool, even, quiet, and in the stark tonal war between the mother's all-black dress and Edma's luminous white one. Two generations, two temperaments, held in the same room by love and a kind of inescapable gravity.

#arthistory #impressionism #berthemorisot

Details

Morisot uses loose, confident strokes to render the fabric; the white mass fills the lower-left quadrant and pulls light into the composition in a way that shows her debt to Manet.
Morisot uses loose, confident strokes to render the fabric; the white mass fills the lower-left quadrant and pulls light into the composition in a way that shows her debt to Manet.
The sister's gaze is slightly inward and disengaged from the reading mother beside her , a mood of private reverie that makes her the emotional anchor of the composition.
The sister's gaze is slightly inward and disengaged from the reading mother beside her , a mood of private reverie that makes her the emotional anchor of the composition.
Total absorption in the text contrasts with Edma's idleness; the two women share the frame but occupy completely different mental spaces.
Total absorption in the text contrasts with Edma's idleness; the two women share the frame but occupy completely different mental spaces.
The mass of black creates a stark tonal opposition to the white dress , Morisot uses color alone to separate the two generations and their temperaments.
The mass of black creates a stark tonal opposition to the white dress , Morisot uses color alone to separate the two generations and their temperaments.
The painting's alternate title is 'The Reading' , this small object is the narrative pivot that divides the two women into reader and non-reader.
The painting's alternate title is 'The Reading' , this small object is the narrative pivot that divides the two women into reader and non-reader.
Transcript

Paris, 1869. A mother reads to her daughter. But look at the daughter's face. She isn't listening. The fan in her lap is folded tight. That black dress swallows the mother whole. The daughter glows in white. Morisot painted her own mother and sister, Edma. Edma was a painter too. She stopped when she married. The book in her mother's hands is the only thing continuing.