The only woman in the show

In April 1874, a group of painters who had spent years getting rejected by the Salon rented the former Paris studio of the photographer Nadar, at 35 boulevard des Capucines, and hung their own show — the First Impressionist Exhibition, organized as a cooperative society of about thirty artists so that no jury could throw anyone out. (The blow-by-blow of that founding — the cooperative’s name, the Leroy review, the naming — lives in the movement-level read. The point here is what Morisot was doing in that room.)

What Morisot was doing in that room was being the only woman in it. Of those roughly thirty exhibiting artists, she was the only one. Not “the only well-known woman” — the only woman, period. She hung nine works of her own — a serious presentation, not a token entry — and the centerpiece, the picture most of the visitors and most of the critics stopped at, was Le Berceau. The catalogue listed it for sale at 800 francs.

A note on what 800 francs meant, because the number is meaningless without it. Eight hundred francs in 1874 Paris was a real but not a triumphant price — somewhere in the range of an upper-middle-class clerk’s annual salary, the kind of price a serious collector would pay for a serious mid-career picture, not a Salon trophy. It was the asking price of someone who knew her work, knew her market, and priced herself as the working professional she was. Monet, the same week, in the same show, sold Impression, Sunrise — the picture that was about to lend its title to the entire movement — for the same 800 francs.

Here is the part the standard cradle story gets wrong, and gets wrong in a particular direction. Le Berceau did not sell. It was listed at 800 francs. The price was on the catalogue. The picture stayed on the wall, then came off the wall, then went home unsold with Morisot. You will see the claim, sometimes in respectable places, that The Cradle “sold for 800 francs at the First Impressionist Exhibition.” It didn’t. It was offered at 800 francs. There is a difference, and that difference is the difference between a painting that found a buyer in 1874 and a painting that didn’t. The Cradle didn’t. Refuse the conflation; the gap between listed and soldis the whole texture of an artist’s actual career.

The reviews were a mixed bag tipping toward warm. The Cradle was, almost universally, the picture by Morisot that critics in 1874 singled out — they noticed the gauze, they noticed the lightness, they registered (with varying degrees of comfort) that the only woman in the room had painted one of the most technically distinctive things on the wall. But “noticed and praised” is not “bought,” and the picture went home. Morisot, to her enormous credit, took none of this as a verdict on the work. She kept showing. She would show at every subsequent Impressionist exhibition for the rest of her life — all eight of them, more than any other Impressionist except Pissarro. The Cradle was not her career. It was her opening move.

And then, eight months after the show came down, in December 1874, she got married. The man she married was Eugène Manet — Édouard Manet’s younger brother. Hold that detail tight, because the most common wrong fact about Morisot in print is that she married Édouard. She did not. Édouard was already married — to Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch pianist who’d been with him since the 1850s — and was therefore not available for Morisot to marry, even if she’d wanted to (the evidence is mixed about whether she did). She married his brother Eugène, who is the often-overlooked Manet: not a painter himself, generally supportive of her career rather than competitive with it, and the man who was, three and a half years later in 1878, the father of Morisot’s daughter Julie Manet. Julie is the daughter who genuinely existed in Berthe’s life — but in The Cradle, six years before Julie was born, the baby is not Julie. The baby is still, forever, Blanche Pontillon — Edma’s daughter — and the woman in the chair is still, forever, Edma. The standard error gets the picture exactly backwards: it tries to put Berthe and Julie into a painting that is, by date alone, impossible for either of them to be in.

So: April 1874, the only woman in a room of thirty male painters, nine pictures up, one centerpiece listed at 800 francs and not sold, the gauze noticed, the picture admired, the picture taken home unsold. December 1874, married. The Cradle — the picture of the sister who did quit, painted by the sister who didn’t— goes home to Edma’s parlour in Cherbourg, and falls quietly out of public view for fifty-six years.