The sister who quit, and the one who didn’t

Start with two girls at the same easel.

In a respectable bourgeois household in mid-1800s Paris — bourgeois meaning the solid, comfortable upper-middle class of professionals and civil servants, not aristocracy and not the working poor — there were two Morisot sisters who painted. Their names were Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) and her elder sister Edma Morisot (1839–1921). They trained together, side by side, under a series of working painters. The decisive teachers were Joseph Guichard, a competent academic instructor, and then — far more importantly — Camille Corot(1796–1875), one of the great French landscape painters of the century, a hinge figure between the old studio tradition and the open-air realism that was about to detonate into Impressionism. Corot taught the Morisot sisters to paint outdoors, fast, from observation. He treated them as serious students. They were.

Both sisters got into the Salonin the 1860s. The Salon — capital S — was the official annual art exhibition of the French state, juried by a panel of conservative academic painters, and it was effectively the only door in town: get hung at the Salon and you had a career, get rejected and you didn’t. Berthe and Edma both got hung, repeatedly, in the 1860s. They were not amateurs decorating a parlour. They were two working professional painters at the start of what looked, on the evidence, like two real careers.

Here is the part it would be sentimental to skate past: Edma was, in the eyes of several of the people who saw them at work, the more naturally talented of the two. That was the early read. It is not a tidy underdog-becomes-genius story; it’s two equally serious sisters with comparable training and comparable Salon credentials, one of whom — Edma — seemed to several observers to have the slightly more obvious gift. Then, in 1869, that career stopped.

It stopped because Edma got married. Her husband was Adolphe Pontillon, a naval officer — a steady, respectable match, exactly the sort of marriage a young bourgeois Frenchwoman of her class was expected to make. And in 1869 marriage, for a woman of that class, was effectively a career-ending event for any othercareer she happened to be running on the side. A naval wife in Cherbourg (the port town on the Channel coast where Pontillon was posted) was supposed to keep a house, receive callers, manage a household, and — when the time came — have children. She was not supposed to keep working professionally at an easel. So Edma, who by every indication loved painting and was good at it, put her brushes down. The family letters from this period are heartbreaking on this point: Edma writes to Berthe missing the work, missing the studio life, missing the way the two of them used to argue over the canvas. She doesn’t go back to it. That door closes.

Berthe — and this is the choice the picture is built on — did not close that door.

It would have been the path of least resistance. She was 28 in 1869, unmarried, living with her parents in Paris, in exactly the same class as her sister, under exactly the same expectations. Every social pressure was pointing her the same way Edma had just gone. She didn’t go. She kept painting. She kept showing at the Salon. She started spending time with the loose group of young painters around Édouard Manet (1832–1883) — the most notorious modern painter in Paris, the one whose work the Salon kept either rejecting outright or hanging where nobody could see it — and she modelled for one of his most important pictures (The Balcony, 1868–69), which is how she ended up close to the circle that was about to become the Impressionists. She was working. She was a professional. She was, in the language of the time, not behaving.

And in 1871, Edma had a daughter. Blanche Pontillonwas born that year in Cherbourg. The next year — 1872 — Berthe traveled to visit, set up an easel in Edma’s house, and painted her sister sitting beside her sleeping infant niece in a white-draped cradle.

Read that sentence again, because the standard cradle blurb gets it wrong almost every time. The seated woman in The Cradle is not Berthe Morisot. It is her sister Edma Pontillon. The baby is not Berthe’s daughter. It is Edma’s daughter Blanche. Berthe, in 1872, was unmarried and childless — she didn’t marry until December 1874 (and to Eugène Manet, Édouard’s younger brother, never to Édouard himself; Édouard was already married). Her own daughter, Julie Manet, wouldn’t be born until 1878, six years after this canvas. There is no version of The Cradlein which Morisot is painting herself as the mother. She is painting her sister — the sister who quit — watching the child whose arrival ended the painting career.

That’s the personal core of the picture before a single brushstroke is on the canvas. One sister, with brushes in her hand, painting the other sister, who put hers down. The Cradle is not a generic Madonna of Impressionism. It is a portrait of the life Berthe is, very deliberately, choosing not to have — painted with all the tenderness in the world for the sister who chose it.

Hold that. The next chapter is about why a respectable Frenchwoman in 1872 painted a nursery in the first place, and why that choice was not a preference.