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Example of impressionist painting11/29/2023 The three figures in the foreground are probably Morisot's sisters Yves and Edma, accompanied by Yves' daughter. The gray sky, opening slightly to a splash of blue at the very top of the canvas, hints at the tumult of the events of the previous five years - the exposition, the war, the fall of Napoleon III's Second Empire, and the Paris Commune - and the notion that the proverbial smoke is, perhaps, finally clearing from Paris in their collective aftermath. This once-bustling portion of the city, whose fecund fields that showcased industry now lie fallow in Morisot's depictions, mirrors the sort of windswept silence of the larger panorama. Now cleared of the massive exhibition buildings, the Champ-de-Mars appears barren and brown, as if its grass has died during the winter. Beyond it stretches the Champ-de-Mars, site of the 1867 Exposition Universelle just five years before, which Manet had painted, famously, from nearly the same spot as Morisot does in this work. The view is painted from the top of a hill colloquially known as the Trocadero, today the site of the Palais de Chaillot, overlooking the Seine. Completed just after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the work depicts a view of Paris as a city finally at peace. This early work is one of the few fully realized landscape works Morisot painted. Her talents and skill won her the public respect of her male colleagues as their equal - an achievement that was very uncommon for the times. She exhibited a keen appreciation of public taste and as a result her works sold well during her lifetime and afterwards. Morisot had the good fortune to not only marry into an artistic family, but also to be wholeheartedly supported by her husband, Eugène Manet (Édouard Manet's younger brother), who sacrificed his own ambition in order to manage her artistic career.Like her male colleagues, she too developed favorite models - including her own daughter, Julie - and participated in the artistic exchanges of the period due to her connections within the Impressionist circle and beyond, remaining an innovator in painting up until her death. Morisot produced canvases that depicted a wide variety of subjects including landscapes, street and urban scenes, nudes, still life's, and portraits.Conversely, her paintings reveal her access to virtually all aspects of feminine life in the late-19 th century, even private, intimate ones that were generally closed to her male counterparts. Morisot was barred due to her gender from accessing the full range of subject matter otherwise available to her male Impressionist colleagues, particularly the seedier aspects of urban life - cabarets, cafés, bars, and brothels.Though frequently self-critical of her own work, and barred by social conventions from pursuing the same subject matter as her male counterparts, Morisot nonetheless developed the connections and familial support that enabled her to carve out her own independent career as an artist for more than three decades and leave a permanent mark on the direction of French art. Morisot cultivated her artistic talents and achieved success at an early age with acceptance to the Salon at age 23, and tenaciously held on to her rank at the forefront of French painters until her death 30 years later. The label of "lunatic," however, was an aberration. When the second Impressionist exhibition opened in the spring of 1876 in Paris, one sharp-tongued critic described its participants as "five or six lunatics, one of which is a woman." The woman, of course, was Berthe Morisot, who in spite of her gender became a leading figure of the most famous artistic movement of the 19 th century.
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