Artist Research | Berthe Moriset (19/10/2020)

 I took an interest in Berthe Moriset's work after I came across Mary Cassatt, more specifically one of her pieces named 'In the Loge' (1878);

Which depicts a fashionable lady dressed for a day at the Comedie Francais, which is a theater in Paris. She is seen holding her binoculars to her face as she enjoys the show. But what intrigued me the most about this painting is the image of the gentleman in the background boldly watching the fashionable lady. This to me represents the idea of the male gaze and how especially back then, women would be gazed upon and when out in public, were never free to be alone or have a sense of independence. They needed to have male company and therefore did not have much of a say in the matter. I believe Cassatt was linking to the idea of the Flaneur and how women did not have the same freedoms as men, especially when it came to impressionist painting. Therefore, with this idea, it lead me to the work of female impressionist painter Berthe Moriset who was one of the first female impressionist painters and was described as 'one of the three great women' (by Gustave Geffory).

Berthe Moriset "woman impressionist" has been described as 'the visual poet of womanhood' for her ability to represent the realness of the women she painted. Cassatt and Morisot were both controlled by social constraints where they were restricted from walking around the City unchaperoned. They resulted in becoming their own kind of Flaneurs, meaning the domestic kind. Morisot would capture women in the their most simple moments of life, doing their daily tasks but represented in a much more powerful way.

Morisot's painting 'In the Dining Room' is one that strikes most as a powerful representation of a woman. Morisot does not focus solely on the shape of the woman's body but rather about her stance and how she holds herself in the room. She stands strong in the center of the painting with the bright colours of the furniture around her, her face is forwards almost staring at us. It is clear that this could be her home and where she would go about her daily duties. However I imagine Morisot was trying to capture the power that a lot of women had in being flaneurs of their own homes and spaces. Despite their restricted opportunities they stand tall and move forward with their lives, taking any sort of time away from other people as an opportunity to work on themselves. Morisot had a gift for 'capturing the complexity of her figures interior experience' which is something I find to be harder to capture in a painting especially in impressionism. Allowing the person and their surroundings to be connected and represented in a way that Morisot aims to do is stunning and really connects the image to the time period.

"Morisot painted outside when she could, a dicey practice at a time when respectable, unaccompanied women passed their lives under what amounted to house arrest - she was liable to be stared at by passers-by and flocked by children."

Moriset's work makes you re-think and re-imagine the history of modern art and how that reflects women and their perspectives on what society meant to them.