Berthe Morisot, early Impressionist criticism and the aesthetics of the plein-air interior

Citing Manet in her notebooks, Berthe Morisot wrote: ‘Edouard: It is possible make plein air bedroom scenes, blue in the morning, lilac in the daytime and orange in the evening’. (Carnet vert A, 1885-6). The Manet/Morisot relationship has long figured in critical interpretations of Morisot’s work from the earliest reviews by Mallarmé (1876) and Rivière (1877) to more recent scholarship by Rey (2016) and Patry (2018). In a parallel vein, criticism on Morisot has always veered towards the biographical, largely due to interiors being understood as her preferred subject matter, in opposition to the plein air paintings of her Impressionist counterparts. The formal aspects of Morisot’s work and more specifically her modernity in terms of facture, gaze and composition, rather than subject choice, have received far less attention. This article seeks to focus on one aspect of Morisot’s contribution to modernist aesthetics: her treatment of light. It was this aspect of Morisot’s œuvre that fascinated nineteenth-century critics. Mallarmé singled out the her use of light and its effect upon objects in his 1876 essay: ‘an entanglement of light effects, emphasised further when the scene is fantastically lit by speckled daylight’, Ephrussi (1881) admired the ‘fleeting lightness […] ‘this tender, laughing and delicate diffused light’ while Mirbeau would later in 1886 write of the ‘unsettling’ effect of these paintings ‘so quivering with light’. Morisot’s experimentations with light were so radical that some critics believed her interior paintings were set outdoors (Manz, 1880).