Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) was born in Bourges on 14 January 1841 into a cultured, well-off family that soon settled in Paris. She and her sister Edma studied painting privately, and from 1862 to 1868 Berthe worked under the guidance of Camille Corot, who introduced her to painting outdoors. She first exhibited at the Salon in 1864, and showed there regularly for the next decade.
In 1868 she met Édouard Manet, who painted her several times, most famously in The Balcony. Their friendship was a close artistic exchange: he freed her touch, and she in turn drew him towards open-air painting. In 1874 she married his brother Eugène, a painter and writer, and in the same year she left the Salon for good to show ten works at the first Impressionist exhibition. She was the only woman among the exhibitors, and she took part in all but one of the eight Impressionist shows, always under her maiden name.
Her subjects were the world she lived in: gardens, harbours, rooms with women and children, painted in long, quick, feathery strokes and mostly on a small scale. Critics often mocked the Impressionists, but their colleagues admired her delicate colour. She and Eugène helped finance the final exhibition in 1886. Eugène died in 1892, and she died of pneumonia in Paris on 2 March 1895, aged 54, leaving a daughter, Julie.