Impressionist Masters Manet and Morisot’s Complex Relationship Gets the Museum Spotlight

Impressionism started out 151 years ago out as a rebellious movement, derided by critics, but it’s box office gold these days, and museums worldwide celebrated its sesquicentennial with major exhibitions last year. Another big draw for museums? Shows that spotlight artistic friendships and rivalries, not only displaying artists’ great works but also revealing their humanity, and sometimes their foibles: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had a blockbuster with its “Manet/Degas” exhibition in 2023, for example.

Now, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will surely have a hit on its hands with “Manet and Morisot,” which it is billing as the first major museum show devoted to the artistic exchange between the French Impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. The museum describes their relationship as the closest between any two artists in the Impressionist circle, and the exhibition traces their relationship from 1868 to 1883.

While their link is well known owing to Manet’s portraits of his younger colleague, the show takes the position that scholars have too often focused on her as a muse and a model, rather than an esteemed peer—and even an influence on the elder artist. Pairings and groupings of works by the two artists promise to reveal their impact on each other. 

“The friendship between these two great artists—collaborative and competitive, playful and charged—really did have a determining effect on the course of art history,” said the show’s curator, Emily A. Beeny, chief curator of the Legion of Honor and curator in charge of European paintings, in a statement. “Its story is written in their pictures. Considering them side by side, we watch it all unfold: their shared interests and struggles, their mutual influence and understanding.”

After opening October 11 at the Legion of Honor, the show will travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art next year. Lenders include major institutions like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio.

It all started when Morisot was copying masterworks at the Louvre in Paris in 1868, and a mutual friend, the painter Henri Fantin-Latour, introduced her to Manet, nine years her senior. He had achieved immense notoriety for his painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863–64); she was just 27 and still a student.

She began posing that fall for his painting The Balcony (1868–69), and would sit for at least 10 more canvases over the next five years. This gave her many hours in the master’s studio, “observing his methods and exchanging ideas,” according to press materials. Manet would soon dub one of her paintings a masterpiece; he kept three of her works in his bedroom; and he even gave her the gift of an easel one Christmas. Their friendship and correspondence were so intense that there has been speculation that they were lovers.

Their relationship would become yet closer when Morisot became engaged in January 1874 to Manet’s brother Eugène, also a painter. But she would choose not to follow Manet’s advice later that year, when he counseled her against renouncing the Paris Salon, the exhibition that served as the bastion of the traditional art establishment, and exhibiting with the upstart Impressionist group. She went on to show her work in all but one of its eight group exhibitions, making her one of the most dedicated members. 

The show will start with The Balcony and other Manet paintings of Morisot. It will trace her growing influence on Manet in the early 1870s, exploring a series of motifs and compositions that the artists shared during that decade. In the 1880s, Morisot’s style became bolder and more sketchy, and Manet shifted his subjects decisively toward depictions of elegant women, which was already something of a trademark of Morisot’s. 

For an example of Manet’s influence on Morisot, consider his Boating (1874/1879), from the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which shows a man and a woman in a small craft, positioned as though the viewer could climb in with them… 

…and then take a look at Morisot’s Summer’s Day (ca. 1879), from the National Gallery in London, which shows two women, similarly positioned, as if the viewer were seated in the boat. 

There’s also Morisot’s Woman at her Toilette (1875–80), from the Art Institute of Chicago, in which a bare-shouldered woman is painted from behind, and Manet’s slightly later Before the Mirror (Devant la glace), from 1877, on loan from New York’s Guggenheim Museum, identical in subject and similarly showing a partially dressed woman from the back. 

The exhibition even continues to trace their relationship after Manet’s death in 1883, since she owned a selection of works by her brother-in-law that continued to influence her.

After Morisot died in 1895, her reputation declined, but feminist art historians shed new light on her work starting five decades ago; she was mentioned, for example, in Linda Nochlin’s epochal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, published in ARTnews in 1971. Artists were also early adopters: Miriam Schapiro created a work in tribute to Morisot as early as 1976. She has since then been thoroughly canonized, and was the subject of a major touring exhibition starting in 2018, co-organized by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Dallas Museum of Art, the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie in Paris, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

“Manet and Morisot” will be on view at the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 100 34th Avenue at Clement Street, San Francisco, October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026. It will then travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd, March 29–July 5, 2026.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com