Caillebotte Cassatt Degas Manet Monet Morisot Pissarro Renoir

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Morisot's most famous painting shows her sister, Edma, watching her baby daughter as she sleeps. Edma remained at her parents' home for several months, regaining her health and strength after the birth of her second child.

Dangerous Talent
In the1800's, refined young ladies were expected to dabble at art and music, but they were not supposed to become professional artists or musicians. When Berthe Morisot was sixteen, her mother wanted her and her sister, Edma, to take art lessons. Their teacher was soon astonished at their talent and worried that serious art lessons might change their lives. He told their mother, "My teaching will not endow your daughters with minor drawing room accomplishments; they will become painters. Do you realize what this means? In the upper-class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary; I might almost say catastrophic. Are you sure you will not come to curse the day when art became the sole arbiter of the fate of two of your children?"

Behind a veil
Morisot gives us the impression the baby is behind a veil of sheer netting by painting her face without any sharp lines or strong colors.

Artist, wife and mother
Women artists were expected to give up painting when they married. It was thought a woman could not combine an artist's career with the responsibilities of a wife and mother. Berthe's sister quit painting when she married and Mary Cassatt chose to remain single, but Berthe managed to do it all. At 34, she married Edouard Manet's younger brother, Eugène, who understood his wife's passionate need to paint. He helped her with the sale of her paintings and gave her the freedom she needed to work.