The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Three impressionists and a little lady
When young Julie – ‘the last of the Manets’ – was orphaned, Monet, Renoir and Degas came to the rescue
As a child, Julie Manet – the only daughter of the impressionist painter Berthe Morisot and the sole niece of Édouard Manet – counted Renoir, Degas, Pissarro and Monet among her closest friends. They painted her, taught her to draw and, later, advised her in love. She saw many of modern art’s greatest works take form on their easels.
Woven into this enchanting story, though, is a more tragic one. When Julie – whose life is explored in a new book, and an ongoing exhibition at the Musée Marmottan, Paris – was 13, her father Eugene Manet (Édouard’s younger brother) died. Three years later, Morisot succumbed to influenza. Thereafter, Julie could not escape the feeling, as noted in her diary, that she was “the last of the Manets... one sad girl left to mourn them”.
She was born in 1878, four years after the historic exhibition at which the term “impressionism” was coined, and where her mother was the only woman among 30 exhibiting artists. Although Morisot would go on to show at six of the seven later impressionist exhibitions (only Pissarro managed all eight), in all but the most broadminded circles she was denied any recognition. “Poor Madame Morisot,” Pissarro wrote to his son, “the public hardly knows her!”
Yet the same social strictures that inhibited Morisot’s career simultaneously helped forge her daughter’s exceptional rapport with the impressionists. Since, for instance, society would have frowned on the idea of Morisot – a haute bourgeoise, turn-of-the-century woman – keeping a studio, or going anywhere to paint unchaperoned, her painting was mostly done at home. And because she could not join Monet and co in the cafés, where the group would discuss the future of art over a drink, she instituted a weekly salon in her apartment. It was, said Renoir, a place where “even Degas became more civil... one of the most authentic centres of civilised Parisian life”.
Julie was witness to it all. Indeed, Morisot took real delight in her daughter’s company – Julie was, she said, “like a little cat, always in a good mood” – painting her, while also shaping Julie’s own talents.
At Morisot’s suggestion, Julie kept a diary: its pages offer insights into both the girl’s blossoming visual sensibility – “A number of boats... formed a lilac mass against the light” – and the minor piques of artistic life (such as Degas and Monet bickering over Morisot’s
memorial exhibition in 1896). Following her father’s death, the diary also became a place for Julie to confide her worries: “I have never dared to speak to Maman about Papa since his death!” she writes a few months later. “Not once have I pronounced his name, it is extraordinary.”
Eugene’s death only intensified the intimacy between mother and daughter; in the years that followed, the two were hardly seen apart. On March 1 1895, Julie’s diary reads: “Dear God, please make Maman better.” But by then, Morisot knew the end was near: “My dearest little Julie, I love you as I die; I shall still love you when I am dead,” she wrote that same day. “You have not caused me any chagrin in your young life. You have beauty, money; make good use of them... Do not cry; I love you more than I can tell you.” Within 24 hours, the influenza had killed her.
Renoir was painting alongside Cézanne when he heard the terrible news. “He closed his paintbox and took the next train to Paris. I have never forgotten the way he arrived... and held me close to him,” Julie later recalled. “I can still see his white cravat with its little red polka dots.” Concerned by what he found, Renoir wrote to Monet: “This poor little thing is very weak and worries us a great deal. She, with her courage, is an unfathomable enigma.” Degas, Alice Monet (whose husband Claude was in Norway at the time), Henri FantinLatour and Mary Cassatt all attended Morisot’s funeral.
In accordance with her mother’s dying wishes, Julie moved in with her cousins, Paule and Jeannie, the orphaned daughters of Morisot’s late elder sister, Yves. Considering Julie and Jeannie were still minors at the time (Paule was 10 years older) the idea was daring; but it also gave the girls independence while ensuring their security.
The trio went everywhere together; to auctions and exhibitions and to paint at the Louvre – even to the Tuesday salons of the avant-garde magazine La Revue Blanche. Tickled by their comings and goings, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé christened them the “Flying Squadron”.
In 1895, the Squadron joined Renoir and his family in Pont-Aven in Brittany. He took them on walks, advised Julie and Paule on their painting, introduced all three to cooking and even taught them to swim. “Monsieur Renoir has been so kind and charming all summer,” reads Julie’s diary. For his part, Renoir recalled how the girls would “laugh like whales”.
The moment Julie turned 18, in 1897, her protectors’ thoughts turned to possible suitors. Degas was the one to make the match – fittingly enough, at the Louvre. On November 11 she arrived, in a velvet dress and a big black hat, to copy Veronese’s Holy Family. Degas, who happened to be there too, gave her a few tips and then led her, Jeannie and Paule into an adjoining gallery, where his pupil, Ernest Rouart, was struggling to reproduce a Mantegna. “Unfortunately,” notes Julie in her diary, “he had done it in a really bright green.”
Jeannie recalled Degas saying to the flustered Rouart: “Now, do you see those young women? Which one would you like me to ask? I assure you that you will not be rebuffed; you are kind, you are wealthy, and you do not look like a rake.” Rouart, petrified, remained mute, though everyone later remembered it as the moment he and Julie fell in love. A few months later, at Degas’s studio, Rouart proposed.
Monet sent congratulations, as did Renoir: “Bravo a thousand times bravo!!! My dear Julie, Now that is truly good news and it fills my wife and I with joy. Now I can tell you that he was the fiancé dreamed of... once again, Bravo!!!”
The couple married in a double ceremony – Mallarmé had recently introduced Jeannie to the poet Paul Valéry – the women in matching dresses.
Here, Julie’s diary ceases – along with any dreams of following in her mother’s footsteps (she had been sufficiently talented to have had pictures accepted by the Salon des Indépendants in 1896 and 1898). Instead, according to the custom of the time, she devoted herself to her husband and, in the years to come, their three children: Julien, Clement and Denis. She became, she would claim in her diary, “a silly young lady who paints fans and lampshades”.
But that’s not quite the full story. Her son Julien later recalled how Julie’s efforts to secure the official record of Morisot’s oeuvre – something for which she had first begun lobbying in 1914 – “took over part of her life”. It wasn’t until Julie was 83 that the catalogue raisonné which Morisot so richly deserved was finally published. Its pages gleamed with reproductions of 416 paintings, 191 pastels and 238 watercolours, alongside a preface by Denis, who seems to have understood his mother – and the grief for her own mother that had veined her life – like no other. “The best way of fighting against the absence of a loved one is to think about them a great deal,” he wrote to Julie, not long before her death in 1966. “One can live even for a being who has gone, and tailor our acts to their tastes and desires. It is a way of extending their company even after death.”
‘I have never forgotten the way Monsieur Renoir held me close to him’