55. Berthe Morisot by Anne Higonnet

Article by Anne Truitt

Toward the end of her life, the French impressionist painter Berthe Morisot wrote, "There is a kind of elevation that does not depend on fortune; it's an indefinable air that distinguishes us and seems to destine us for great things; it's the value that we give ourselves imperceptibly, especially to our spirit."
This sense of knowing one's own destiny is the spring of originality.......
In Morisot's paintings women are like Tiburce Morisot's description of his famous sister: "meditative, mysterious, like all those in whom silence is due not to deficiency of thought but to a disdain for its expression." Even side by side with their children, her subjects contemplate themselves apart, in an atmosphere of self-imposed solitude that lifts them above their circumstances.