A groundbreaking exhibition at San Francisco's Legion of Honor museum is challenging traditional assumptions about artistic influence between two major French painters. "Manet & Morisot," running until March 1, presents compelling evidence that Berthe Morisot (1841-95) served as an artistic beacon for the older and more established Édouard Manet (1832-83), rather than simply following his lead as art history has long suggested.
The exhibition's most striking revelation comes roughly halfway through the show, where visitors can observe how the two painters' styles began converging in unexpected ways. Despite Morisot being Manet's junior, one of his favorite models, close friend, and eventual sister-in-law through her marriage to his younger brother Eugène, the evidence suggests she was influencing his artistic direction rather than the reverse.
This artistic convergence becomes dramatically apparent in the pairing of Manet's "Before the Mirror" (1877) and Morisot's "Woman at her Toilette" (around 1875-80). Manet's painting depicts a woman in her dressing room from behind as she gazes into a mirror and adjusts her corset. Notably, he abandoned his usual palette of blacks and browns inspired by Goya and Velázquez, instead choosing lighter colors like icy blues and peachy whites with looser, more fluid brushstrokes – techniques typically associated with Morisot.
Morisot's own toilette scene demonstrates her signature style, where murky white swirls of the woman's dress continue onto the wallpaper, obliterating clear delineation between figure and background. Despite Manet's usual preference for solid-looking forms, his painting similarly allows white streaks defining the skirt to spill into the background, suggesting he was taking cues from Morisot and shifting from his realist origins toward a hazier, more atmospheric – many would say truly Impressionistic – aesthetic.
Perhaps the most explicit example of Manet following Morisot's footsteps involves their seasonal allegory paintings. Among Morisot's works in the fifth Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1880, which Manet attended, was a pair of oil-on-canvas portraits titled "Summer" (1880) and "Winter" (1880). These modern, urban allegories used chic Parisienne fashions – a ruffled silk cream-colored blouse for summer, a dark olive coat and muff for winter – to announce seasonal changes.
In 1881, just two years before his death from syphilis complications, Manet began work on two portraits at the same scale, featuring models Jeanne and Méry. His family believed these were meant to represent Spring and Autumn, titling them posthumously as such. The exhibition makes a persuasive case that Manet created these works to complete Morisot's series, showing all four seasons – the capstone to their artistic dialogue – together for the first time.
Curator Emily A. Beeny notes in the exhibition catalog that Manet's resemblance to Morisot's work in his final years had practical origins. As his illness restricted his daily movements to his home, studio, and suburban summer houses, he favored simpler, single-figure studio portraits and plein-air garden paintings. "The Paris of a late 19th-century male invalid was not so different from that of a late 19th-century lady," Beeny writes.
The exhibition faces significant curatorial challenges in its loosely chronological organization. One difficulty involves making Manet's narrowing painted world – initially dismissed as too frilly or feminine – seem substantial. The even bigger challenge is pairing earlier works without overshadowing Morisot, whose paintings tend to be more intimate in scale and subtle in their effects.
The opening gallery successfully avoids these problems, consisting mainly of Manet's keenly sensual portraits of Morisot. The centerpiece is "The Balcony" (1868-69), his multi-figure composition showing a dark-eyed Morisot looking out over a green balcony railing with serious ennui. This canvas was one of Monet's personal favorites, which he kept until his death before it was purchased by Gustave Caillebotte, another lover of balcony scenes.
However, problems emerge in the second gallery, which contains more direct comparisons between the two artists' city views of Paris and various harbor and beachside scenes. Here, Manet's paintings eclipse Morisot's in size, drama, and power, much like an extrovert outperforming an introvert at a public gathering.
This disparity reflects the structural sexism that shaped their respective careers and explains why curators have previously delivered Manet/Degas, Manet/Velázquez, and Manet/Monet surveys while taking much longer to present Manet/Morisot. Manet's canvases are significantly larger, reflecting the support he received from collectors and dealers, while Morisot as a woman struggled to maintain and communicate her identity as a serious artist.
Art critic Sebastian Smee, in his book "Paris in Ruins," described both Morisot's depressive episodes and her fiercely competing demands: her decorum versus her ambition and the expectation of marriage versus her desire to remain single and devoted to her art. "The various threads of Berthe's predicament seemed to be flexed against each other in a self-tightening knot," Smee writes, offering an apt image of structural sexism's binds. While Smee suggests Morisot was in love with the married Manet, Beeny challenges this assumption due to lack of documentary evidence.
Morisot's early paintings can appear sketchy and unfocused compared to Manet's bolder forms and colors. Her city view in the exhibition seems downright depressed, perhaps reflecting trauma from the Franco-Prussian War. Their beach paintings from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts – oddly hung top-to-bottom instead of side-by-side – each feature sailboats in the distance. With minimal brushwork, Manet captures a mainsail's taut curve shaped by wind's kinetic energy, while Morisot's sailboats appear as paint daubs bobbing without clear motion or direction.
Despite feminist hopes to celebrate Morisot's work, the direct comparisons often favor Manet's economy of form and gesture, which proves startling and moving picture after picture, eclipsing Morisot's more diffused approach. This may reflect conditioning by the Modernist project of Cézanne and other Post-Impressionists, but the visual impact remains undeniable.
The exhibition's structure prevents full immersion until the final gallery, which is devoted entirely to Morisot's work after Manet's death. This space fills with paintings of her daughter Julie at different stages, from toddler playing in sand to teenager playing violin. Here, visitors finally have time and space to sink into the shimmery but never fake-cheery world Morisot created, where quick brush flicks grasp at feelings that make everyday, fleeting moments worth remembering.
The exhibition, curated by Emily A. Beeny, will travel to Cleveland Museum of Art from March 29 to July 5, 2026. Tickets are $35 with concessions available. Last year, the Legion of Honor hosted a larger Impressionist survey, "Mary Cassatt at Work," bringing nearly 100 Cassatt works to San Francisco and allowing full immersion in her pastel-hued world of nannies and domestic scenes – a format that might have better served Morisot's artistic legacy.
