On view: October 11, 2025 – March 1, 2026
Opening day curator talk on October 11 at 1pm
FAMSF.org; 415-750-3600
Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) had the closest relationship between any two members of the Impressionist circle. They were friends and colleagues, painter and model, collectors of each other’s work, and, following Morisot’s marriage to Manet’s brother, family. This closeness had a determining effect on the course of art history, for its story is written in their paintings.
Seen side by side, the works on view trace the evolution of a singular friendship by collaborative and competitive turns, playful and charged, lit by an enduring mutual sympathy and a shared desire to make art new.
Manet and Morisot were quite different painters and people. Where he was all charm and wit, open to the world in ways then possible only for a man of his elevated social class, she was admired for her reserve, her discreet elegance and intelligence: the corresponding virtues of a nineteenth-century bourgeois lady.
The pleasures of Manet’s art lie in its indelible graphic power, its dialogue with the old masters, its joyous, outsized ambition. The pleasures of Morisot’s are subtler ones of light and surface, of images that seem to shimmer with the possibility of their own disappearance. Manet was essentially a studio painter, producing pictures he hoped would look dashed off “at the first go,” through extensive revision. By contrast, Morisot was trained as a landscape painter, working swiftly and decisively outdoors under changing conditions of weather and light.
Though cast by contemporary press as the father of Impressionism, Manet never joined the Impressionists’group exhibitions, continuing to show at the annual public Salon. Morisot, conversely, was among the group’s earliest and most faithful adherents.
From the beginning, critics often mistook Morisot for Manet’s pupil or reduced their complex relationship to his magnetic portraits of her. But, while Morisot looked to Manet for inspiration and approval during her early career, by the last years of his life, Manet had begun to follow Morisot’s example, emulating her choice of subjects, her high-key colors, even her rapid, fluttering brushstrokes.
