Route Responsibles : Bougival city (Catherine Burger, Laurence François)

French

The following summer, Berthe was with his sister Yves in Saint-Jean-de-Luz where she again saw Corot; the two women then went to Madrid in 1872. Upon her return to France, she settled in Maurecourt in the Seine & Oise Department and this period corresponds to the full blossoming of her artistic personality, marked by the extreme delicacy of her clear and rapid strokes—a hallmark of the greatest Impressionists.

The death of her father in 1874 coincided with her interest in the first impressionist exposition which obliged her to renounce the Salon whose jury rejected  à priori the paintings of this new pictorial form. In December of that year, Berthe married Eugène Manet, brother of Edouard, whom she had met in Fécamp, in Normandy, during the summer.  She then worked in Manet’s property in Gennevilliers near Paris then at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, before returning with her husband to London.

Between 1875 and 1885, she travelled with her husband in Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy, attracted by open space with water and changing light, where boats, sea, rivers, clouds and mist are captured with his brushes… After these travel in Europe, ‘there were no more excursions in other countries, excepted with brushes and colors on the footpath of the only world who loved” wrote his biograph, Dominique Bona.

Upon her return to France, she rejoined her two sisters: Edma in Maurecourt, Yves in Cambrai and continued to participate regularly in the impressionist expositions, with the exception of 1879, year of the birth of her daughter Julie who figured regularly in her subsequent works…

During the summer of 1880, the artist painted scenes of Beuzeval, Houlgate, then Nice and northern Italy during the following winter.

From 1881 to 1884, each summer the family rented a house in Bougival, before moving definitively to the 16th Arrondissement in Paris, where she received her friends each Thursday:  Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Fantin-Latour, Puvis-de-Chavannes, Rodin, Jules Ferry, Mallarmé…

In 1886 she worked on Jersey, then exposed the following year with the XX in Brussels, Durand-Ruel in New York and in international expositions of Parisian gallery owners.  During the winter 1888/89, she returned to the Côte d’Azur, where she rented a villa in Cimiez (Nice); upon her return to the Paris region, she set up in Mézy, not far from Gargenville, where Whistler and Renoir visited her.  

After the death of her husband in 1892, she was invited to Valvins by Mallarme, to Giverny by Monet; she stayed in Portrieux, went to Brittany, especially to Nantes. She died three years later, having contracted influenza from her daughter.

In March 1896 Degas and Rouart organized a huge retrospective in Paris with 300 of her works…