A room of her own I Berthe Morisot's studio-salon

For much of her career, Berthe Morisot painted without a dedicated studio. The École des Beaux-Arts did not accept women until 1897. When her father had an atelier built for his daughters in the garden of the family home in 1865, it was destroyed during the siege of Paris in 1871. For the next two decades, Morisot painted in her bedroom, her drawing room, her garden, wherever light and space allowed.

Claude Monet, "Le Repos, portrait de Berthe Morisot", 1870, Museum of Art, Rhode Island, Providence, USA / Bridgeman Images

In the early 1880s, she and her husband Eugène Manet built a house at 40 rue de Villejust in the 16th arrondissement, designed in part around her needs as an artist. On the ground floor, behind tall windows opening onto the garden, she finally had a studio-salon of her own.

Edgar Degas, Renoir and Mallarmé at 40 rue de Villejust, 16 December 1895. Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

The room itself was a quiet manifesto. There was no separation between the working space and the social space, no door closing off the easel from the conversation. The furniture could be moved according to the day, paintings in progress remained on view, the smell of oil and turpentine mingled with that of cut flowers. To enter the room was to enter the work. For an artist whose central subject was the porous border between the domestic and the modern, this indistinction was not an accident, it was a position.

Berthe Morisot, In the Dining Room, 1886, oil on canvas, 61.3 x 50 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Chester Dale Collection.

It was here that Morisot hosted the most remarkable Thursday gatherings in Paris. Mallarmé, Renoir, Degas, Monet were all regulars, all part of what had become, around her, a family of the heart. The Jeudis Morisot were among the most prized salons of the period, but they were unusual in one essential respect. Morisot was not the hostess who animated the conversation of men, she was the centre of gravity. Mallarmé read his poems for her judgement. Renoir brought new canvases for her eye. Degas, famously difficult, came back week after week. Her authority was understood, not announced.

Berthe Morisot, Eugène Manet and his Daughter in the Garden, 1883, oil on canvas, private collection / Bridgeman Images.

The space was an extension of her practice. She painted her daughter Julie obsessively, the light in the garden, the veranda, the domestic interiors that were both her subject and her daily reality. Morisot was the only woman to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, and one of its most radical voices. The room at rue de Villejust was where that radicalism was quietly, persistently sustained.

Virginia Woolf would not write A Room of One's Own for another forty years.

Morisot had already painted it.

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872, oil on canvas, 56 x 46 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris