Berthe Morisot

Paule Gobillard (the sitter, until at least 1941)

Private Collection

Galerie Hopkins-Custot, Paris

Noortman Master Paintings, Maastricht

Acquired from the above

Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Berthe Morisot: Madame Eugène Manet, exposition de son oeuvre, 1896
 
Paris, Galerie Marcel Bernheim, Exposition rétrospective Berthe Morisot, 1922, no. 79
 
Paris, Galerie L. Dru, Quelques tableaux: études, pastels, aquarelles et dessins de Berthe Morisot, 1928, no. 23
 
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Exposition d'oeuvres de Berthe Morisot, 1929, no. 143
 
Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie, Berthe Morisot, 1841-1895, 1941, no. 140

Marie-Louise Bataille and Georges Wildenstein, Berthe Morisot, Catalogue des Peintures, Pastels et Aquarelles, Paris, 1961, no. 500, fig. 486, illustrated

Original canvas. The pastel is fresh and apart from some minor specks of losses in the blue rectangle above the other head, this work is in excellent condition.
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The subject of the present work is the artist's niece, Paule Gobillard, who was also an artist.  Morisot often depicted moments in her private life, thus combining her role as a leading figure in the avant-garde with that of an upper-class-woman belonging to a close-knit family.  As William Scott has noted: " Morisot apparently did not have a set working routine. According to the poet Paul Valéry (1871 – 1945), when she painted 'she would take up the brush, leave it aside, take it up again in the same way as a thought will come to us, vanish, and return."  Her biographer Armand Fourreau, noted, "In Paris she was accustomed to paint in her drawing room, laying aside her canvas, brushes, and palette in a cupboard as soon as an unforeseen visitor was announced" (Armand Fourreau, Berthe Morisot, Paris, 1925, p. 189).  Although Morisot willingly, and, by all accounts, very graciously fulfilled the social and familial obligations expected of a woman of station in late-nineteenth century France, for the first twenty-five years of the Third Republic she persevered to produce images that focus on both her own world and subjects from modern life.

Throughout her career Morisot explored the boundaries of modern art, always questioning accepted practice and experimenting with a variety of ideas about color and line.  As a result, she made a remarkable contribution to late nineteenth-century French painting and the history of Impressionism.  In her own words, "[O]f what use are the rules? None at all. It is only necessary to feel and see things in a different way and where can that be learned?...  The eternal question of drawing and color is futile because color is only an expression of form.  You can't train a musician by scientific explanations of sound vibrations, nor the eye of a painter by explaining the relationship between line and tone" (quoted in A. Fourreau, ibid., p. 189).  As the critic Jean Ajalbert wrote on the occasion of the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, "She eliminates cumbersome epithets and heavy adverbs in her terse sentence. Everything is subject and verb" (J. Ajalbert, La Revue Moderne, Paris, June 1886).