Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets by Manet Magnet

Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets by Edouard Manet, oil on canvas 1872, is a portrait painting of a young woman gazing directly at the viewer, holding a small bunch of red violet flowers and wearing a tall black hat with bows, black dress, and black ribbon tied around her neck. The subject was a prominent Impressionist painter who exhibited with the famous Impressionist group in Paris. With fluid brush strokes of quickly applied oil paint, Manet creates an image of a beautiful, young, elegant, intelligent and sophisticated young woman, the depth of her gaze and warmth of personality playing against the flattened shapes and striking contrasts of black and white. The young woman’s costume and hat form a near silhouette against the diaphanous white and gray background, as unlike the other Impressionists Manet enthusiastically used the color ivory black much as his beloved Dutch and Spanish old master predecessors such as Goya and Velazquez. Edouard Manet (1832 - 1883) was a French realist painter and one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement whose controversial paintings marked the founding of modern art. Pursuing art at a young age, Manet studied for 6 years under the academic painter Thomas Couture, and on trips abroad encountered the Dutch masters as well as the Spanish painters Velazquez and Goya. Opening his own studio in Paris, Manet produced many paintings under the influence of the Realism of Courbet, painting scenes from modern life. His masterpieces Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia of 1863 aroused great controversy, and though the artist continued to exhibit in the official Paris Salon he befriended Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other key Impressionist painters. Painting in a loose, sketchy manner of painterly brush strokes and flattened forms which some found to be unfinished, Manet produced many scenes of bohemian cafe nightlife, journalistic scenes of wars and current events, as well subjects from the streets of Paris with such a spontaneity and compositional innovation that they made a lasting influence on younger generations of artists and enshrined him as the true "painter of modern life". Though the artist died young, Manet created paintings that were the lodestone and rallying point for the school of Impressionism and the founders of modern painting.