BERTHE MORISOT | Anémones roses

Galerie Druet, Paris (acquired by 1890)
Private Collection, France
Galerie Hopkins-Thomas, Paris
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1987 and sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 7, 2012, lot 133)
Acquired at the above sale

Paris, Galerie André Weill, Morisot, 1947, n.n.
Tokyo, Takashimaya Art Gallery, Six femmes peintres: Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès, Mary Cassatt, Suzanne Valadon, Marie Laurencin, Natalia Gontcharova, 1983, no. 99, illustrated in color in the catalogue
Paris, Galerie Hopkins-Thomas, Exposition Berthe Morisot, 1987, no. 44, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Denis Rouart, Berthe Morisot, Paris, 1954, illustrated pl. 52
Marie-Louise Bataille & Georges Wildenstein, Berthe Morisot, Catalogue des peintures, pastels et aquarelles, Paris, 1961, no. 268, illustrated pl. 79
Louis de Trampt, "Perspective," in Joyce, June, 1987, illustrated in color n.p.
Alain Clairet, Delphine Montalant & Yves Rouart, Berthe Morisot, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Montolivet, 1997, no. 272, illustrated p. 248

Please contact the Impressionist & Modern Art department directly for a condition report of this lot.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Although primarily confined to the domestic sphere, female artists successfully utilized the Impressionist style to gain unprecedented entry into the world of the avant-garde. While Impressionist painting was purportedly the realm of the male flâneur, Baudelaire’s declaration of support for “the painting of modern life” bolstered a renewed interest in the once-overlooked production of genre paintings. Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb attest to this dynamic shift between style and content: “With the conscious rejection of historical narrative painting and large-scale figure compositions by avant-garde critics and artists, genre painting could be elevated to the ‘painting of modern life’ and proclaimed as the painting of the new age. The meaning of the depiction of everyday life, long the concern of genre painters, albeit with some didacticism, was transformed through an alteration of technique… Those who adopted Impressionist techniques to represent contemporary life, on the other hand, were seen by sympathetic critics and artists to be making an intervention against the restrictive subjects, styles, and meanings promoted by the academy” (Kathleen Adler & Tamar Garb, Berthe Morisot, Oxford, 1987, p. 85). 

Like her female contemporaries Mary Cassatt and Eva Gonzalès, Morisot was prohibited from the majority of public spaces and was confined to the sites prescribed by her class and gender. 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 focused on both her own world and subjects from modern life. While male Impressionists such as Camille Pissarro painted such works by choice, interior scenes and still lifes provided one of the few windows into the avant-garde for their female counterparts (see fig. 1). Ultimately, Morisot’s limitation to a private female domain spurred a deeper examination of those environments available within the confines of her sex, capturing the act of looking and recording life in progress from her personal point of view.