096

  • Jeune fille au chat, or Girl with a Cat

  • 1889
  • Berthe Morisot (French 1841-1895)
  • Drypoint
  • 14.8 x 12.1 cm., 5-7/8 x 4-3/4" image
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase in Honor of Professor Ellen Hay, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 2010.5

Essay by Ellen Hay, Former Professor of Communication Studies

The print Girl with a Cat (1889) is from a drypoint etching by Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) of her daughter Julie Manet. The punch holes at the top and bottom indicate the print was made from a plate that Morisot had cancelled. Reminiscent of a painting that Morisot and her husband, Eugene Manet, commissioned from Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1887, it was done at a time when her friend Mary Cassatt urged Morisot to study printmaking. Morisot also produced the image in pastels. Her friendships with artists such as Renoir, Cassatt, brother-in-law édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Edgar Degas place Morisot at the center of an artistic movement, the Independents, that resulted in the first Impressionist exhibit in 1874. While she had successfully shown paintings at the prestigious Salon, she actively encouraged her contemporaries to stage a rival exhibit that challenged the capricious juries of the Salon system.

The works of the Impressionists (a name derived from Monet's painting Impression: Sunrise) were markedly different than those favored by the French Academy of Fine Arts in their execution, subject-matter, and use of color. These alternative exhibitions allowed Morisot to escape the rigid parameters and show in an array of different media, ranging from oil paintings to watercolors to prints. Morisot submitted works to all but one of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, only missing the year Julie was born. She seems to have participated freely and frequently in the milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris. Morisot's upper middle class parents were not bound by conventions, and provided Morisot and her sisters with excellent instruction in the arts. She and her sisters were featured in each others' works and also included in paintings by Manet, Renoir, and Degas. Recognizing that women were not able to participate in the intellectual café life that typified the era, her mother, and later Morisot herself, hosted weekly soirées that brought together influential artists, writers, and thinkers.