Berthe Morisot's images of women - Anne Higonnet

Like her colleagues - Cassatt, Degas, Monet and Renoir - Berthe Morisot sought to represent the experience of modern life, a project that for her entailed rethinking what it meant to be a woman in the 19th century. Through close attention to the artist's work and its context, Anne Higonnet shows how Morisot transformed her femininity and its visual culture into Impressionist paintings.;Higonnet presents a clear picture of visual traditions that, though very much a part of Morisot's world and work, figure only marginally in art history. Amateur picture making - enormously popular among 19th-century women - and industrialized feminine imagery dominated by the fashion plate provided a background and context for Morisot's imagery. Focusing on formal choices - poses, composition, brushwork - Higonnet compares Morisot's images of women with those of Casatt, Degas and Manet. And she examines critical themes: Morisot's self-portraiture; her attempts, with Cassatt, at painting the female nude; and her pictorial explorations of the mother-daughter relationship.