Berthe Morisot – Woman at her Toilette

There is a danger in choosing this work by Morisot to write about, of reinforcing some of the early prejudices that her work provoked, those slights which emphasized her paintings’ femininity, their sentiment and a certain nebulousness to the brushwork. Some critics dismissed her as a mere dilettante, a relatively privileged bourgeoise who, as a woman, couldn’t be seriously compared to male artists, especially since there is a clear tendresse that imbued much of her work - it was judged unfairly and unjustifiably to be insufficiently consequential. Even Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of the seminal novel of aestheticism, À rebours whose discernment was usually unerring, once misogynistically described her brushwork as ‘hysterical’. And yet I think there is much to unpick (pun intended – see later) in a painting like this. On the one hand, its loose technique is quintessentially impressionist in style but on the other Morisot eschews the en plein air subject matter of some of her notable contemporaries such as Monet, Sisley and Pissarro in favour of an intimate domestic scene to give us a portrait in which, intriguingly the face of the sitter is not visible.

Berthe Morisot, Woman at her Toilette (1880), oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago

The painting presents us with a young woman sat with her back to us in front of a large, tilted mirror at the foot of a bed. A small table sits nearby on which we can see a flower-topped glass vase, a discarded corsage and some cosmetic vessels. Her head is inclined to the right as she reaches up into her coiffure de bal ‘updo’ to begin its unpinning. We surmise that she has just entered the bedroom after a social gathering at which, to judge by her slightly flushed cheek, there may have been dancing. Now is the time for her to disrobe, to remove the coutured carapace of her public identity to reach down for her real self. Unlike some of Degas’ similar subject matter (more often than not nudes), this painting does not suggest anything voyeuristic. Nor is it suggestive of vanity – the woman is looking down rather than directly back at her reflection. Rather it feels as if we have been granted privileged access to what is normally a private de-toilette ritual – our position as viewers feels familiar and sisterly rather than prurient despite the fact that one strap of her dress has fallen from her shoulder to expose more of her back. There is vulnerability in this, but which is neutralised to some extent by the comfort and security of the room’s privacy. There is certainly none of the conscious provocation that John Singer Sargent engendered with his painting Madame X a few years later when a similarly fallen strap had to be repainted in its restored position to re-establish propriety.

The subject has yet to remove the black velvet choker from around her neck. This was certainly a common enough fashionable item at the time, but I think it also represents an allusion to Édouard Manet’s work from 1863, Olympia, which depicts a naked woman, this time atop rather than beside a bed and who stares back at the viewer challengingly, her choker signifying her role as a courtesan.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863-65, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The complex relationship between Manet and Morisot is well documented so I won’t go over old ground except to say that there clearly existed not only mutual respect between them but direct reciprocal influences too. Their lives became further entangled with Morisot’s marriage to Édouard’s younger brother Eugène in 1874 and the artistic dynamics (not to mention the personal ones too) that played out between them all makes the likelihood of such a visual quotation between close fellow-artists more likely and not a fanciful idea. The fact that Olympia itself made visual allusions back to Inges’ Grande Odalisque and Titian’s Venus of Urbino, references which Morisot would have been quick to recognise, makes her own conscious allusiveness more likely. I think that the choker represents, along with all the accoutrements of the female bourgeois life, a restraint, a subjugation. Its starkness and therefore its salience in the painting against the pallor of the skin and the satiny whites of the dress, is unmistakable.

In fact, I think this painting can be read as a study in impermanence and sought-after emancipatory unmaking. This woman is living the life expected of one of her rank and is enveloped by the tightly-boddiced dress and bustle, no doubt fashion-obliged to reveal more than she might wish with her (unseen) low décolleté. The confection of her hair, pulled and pinned into precarious position, while no doubt beautiful, would not have felt comfortable. The whole ensemble was intended to appear effortless when displayed on the social stage but Morisot’s depiction of the behind-the-scenes reality probes at its exacting arduousness instead. She is like an actor fresh from performance, exhausted by the whole production aimed at pleasing an audience, now at rest and thoughtful, ready to erase the make-up. I feel sure she wants out of it all. She inhabits a room whose Second Empire furnishings are de rigueur, but the floral pattern of the counterpane, the colours of which are echoed in the dress to indicate her rightful position within the setting, are somehow simultaneously insubstantial, the gossamer flimsiness and transparency making them seem, like the blush at her cheek, transient. For the artist to give us a view of a dress disassembly is like a refutation of the whole conformist caboodle. The woman’s heated, corporeal presence, her fleshy ‘hereness’ rests in marked contrast to those flimsy and souffléed appurtenances of class and society.

The reflection of the rose in the mirror shows its yellow colour dulled, as if in anticipation of its future fading and its paint seems to deliquesce before our eyes on the left of the work. The only item of solidity and substance in the room appears to be the mirror frame and it is interesting to note that it is at the foot of this that the artist has chosen to inscribe her name. It seems like a declaration of assertiveness in the midst of so much ephemerality. Some have speculated that the signature positioning on the mirror suggests that this may be a self-portrait, although the subject’s hair colour differs markedly from Morisot’s own dark brown.

The mark-making and its repudiation of ‘finish’, of volume and exacting mimesis in favour of the fugitive sensory experience of light and colour, the characteristic style that justifies Morisot’s recognition as a foundational impressionist painter, never lets us forget that we are looking at a flat canvas on which pigment  is laid down; that un-perspectival bedspread might be from a Matisse or a Vuillard work. We can see the artist’s hand in each stroke, not just in the signature.  So, the subject matter, what I have called ‘unmaking’, is paradoxically rendered by an open admission, a celebration even, of its facture.