Julie Manet’s Impressionist Childhood
‘To record one’s thoughts every day is an excellent idea; nothing forms one’s style more effectively. And by this I mean not the habit of turning out fine phrases but of putting one’s thoughts into words. It even seems to me that we ought to be very lenient, to condone lack of correctness, provided that the feeling is real and that the ideas are personal’, were the painter Berthe Morisot’s somewhat prophetic comments in 1884 to her sister Edma, who had sent her the diary of her eldest daughter to read.1
Many young girls still confide their inner thoughts to diaries, and it is hardly surprising that, with her mother giving all her encouragement, Berthe Morisot’s only daughter, Julie, would prove to be no exception to the rule. Indeed, we hear that Julie, at the age of 10, is writing her ‘memoirs’ as well as learning to play the mandolin.2 This was a short-lived attempt and it wasn’t until August 1893, at 14, that Julie began her diary in earnest: no neat leather-bound volume with lock and key; just untidy notes scribbled in old exercise books, often in pencil, the presentation as spontaneous as the contents.3 It reveals a vivid depiction of a vital period in France’s cultural history seen through the youthful and precocious eyes of the youngest member of what was surely the most prominent artistic family of the time.
Julie Manet was born in Paris on 14 November 1878 into a wealthy and cultured milieu at the height of the Impressionist era. In many ways, she had a very conventional childhood, loved and cherished by adoring and artistic parents and relatives. Her diary recounts cloudless summers with countless trips to interesting places and Parisian winters crammed with concerts and exhibitions. But this was no ordinary bourgeois family or circle of friends: her sailing trips were with the poet Mallarmé, her picnics with the painter Renoir, and her visits to the Louvre with Degas. As the diary closes, the poet Paul Valéry courts and later marries her first cousin, Jeannie.
Julie was the only child of the painter Berthe Morisot and her husband Eugène Manet, the younger brother of Édouard Manet, the most controversial artist of the day. By the time she began her Journal the Impressionists were well known, if not always highly respected, middle-aged, and already going their different ways artistically. They remained, however, surprisingly close and friendly to each other and provided her with a loving and supportive circle when she was left an orphan in 1895.
Berthe Morisot, born in 1841, was an experienced and serious painter by the time she married in 1874, only a few months after she had exhibited four paintings, two pastels and three watercolours in the first Impressionist exhibition held at the photographer Nadar’s studio in the boulevard des Capucines. Berthe had always been encouraged by her family to paint, but what had begun as a required and ladylike pastime had become a serious career. While her two sisters, Yves and Edma, had given up painting when they married, for Berthe things were very different: ‘Do you realize what this means?’ Guichard, Berthe’s art teacher, wrote to Madame Morisot, when he realized that her daughter wanted to become a ‘professional’ artist. ‘In your bourgeois environment this will be a revolution, I might almost say a catastrophe!’4
In 1868, at one of her frequent visits to the Louvre, Berthe Morisot was introduced to Édouard Manet by the painter Henri Fantin-Latour. Their attraction to each other was spontaneous, immediate and long-lasting: Manet soon felt a frustrated amitié amoureuse for this beautiful and serious young woman as well as sincere admiration for her obvious talent. For the very Catholic Berthe, we suspect a much more cautious relationship was in order because Manet was not only a married man but also had a wholly deserved reputation as a philanderer. Berthe willingly served as his model in 1869 for Le Balcon5 and Le Repos,6 and for her favourite portrait by Manet, Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes,7 painted in 1872, which she bought when it came up at the Duret sale in March 1894.
Berthe Morisot never actually worked with Manet: his only ‘pupil’, as such, was Eva Gonzalès.8 Berthe and Manet seemed more like ‘colleagues’, in constant contact, and their influence on each other’s work cannot be overestimated. However, no matter how persuasive he may have been, Manet could not dissuade her from joining the Impressionist group, which he believed to be a futile venture.9 Berthe had been impressed by Monet and Degas, whom she had met at her mother’s famous Thursday evening soirées, and she exhibited at all the ‘Impressionist’ shows thereafter.
Édouard Manet wrote in jest to Fantin-Latour on 26 August 1868,
I totally agree with you … The Misses Morisot are delightful; it’s just a pity that they don’t happen to be men. However, I suppose they could, as women, serve the cause of Painting by marrying Academicians and give the Old Buffers a shock. Come to think of it, that might be asking a bit much of them!
He could hardly have imagined that Berthe would eventually marry Eugène, his beloved younger brother, in December 1874 at the Église de Passy. She had spent the years of the Franco-Prussian War in Paris with her parents and later suffered, like all Parisians, the miseries of the Commune. Her health was poor but she had never stopped working. She was also the only unmarried Mademoiselle Morisot left, after Yves had married Théodore Gobillard, a tax official from Quimperlé in 1867, and Edma had married Adolphe Pontillon, a naval officer based at Lorient, in 1869. Very little is known about Eugène apart from the fact that he was a frequent model for his brother and posed for the notorious Déjeuner sur l’herbe. He himself seems to have been a quiet, rather self-effacing man, always subject to ill health, who did not have a profession but lived quite comfortably off his private income.
Marriage did not change Berthe Morisot’s way of life or her artistic pursuits in any way: until her mother’s death in 1876, the couple lived with her and then moved to an apartment at 9 avenue d’Eylau. Berthe always remained a grande bourgeoise without the bohemian traits of many of her contemporaries. By then her best friends, Degas, Monet and Édouard Manet, were far from being what we think of as starving artists living from hand to mouth: only Renoir and Monet had ever had serious financial problems in their youth, but by the time Julie was a teenager, even they led calm, hard-working middle-class lives.
Julie’s arrival on 14 November 1878 temporarily interrupted her mother’s career as an exhibitor with the Impressionists.10 Having a first baby at 37, when her health was far from good, must have been an ordeal for Berthe Morisot, but it was one which she certainly never regretted. In a letter to her sister Yves, Berthe seems to have had a few reservations about the appearance of her newborn baby daughter:
Well, I am just like everybody else! I regret that Bibi is not a boy. In the first place because she looks like a boy; then, she would perpetuate a famous name; and mostly for the simple reason that each and every one of us, men and women, are in love with the male sex … Your Bibi11 is a darling; you’ll find mine ugly in comparison, with her head as a flat as a paving stone … All poor Julie has to offer is her fat cheeks and her pretty complexion.
And in another letter to Yves: ‘Julie or Rose is like a big inflated balloon … My daughter is a Manet to the tips of her fingers; even at this early date she is like her uncles, she has nothing of me.’12 Julie was to become her mother’s inspiration and her favourite model.
Julie had an idyllic childhood, spending summers in Bougival where, in 1881, Berthe and her husband had found a villa to rent at 4 rue de la Princesse. The banks of the Seine around Rueil and Croissy were favourite haunts of the Impressionists: Manet at Rueil, Renoir and Sisley at Louveciennes, Pissarro at Marly, all depicted the lazy and tranquil atmosphere of what is now no more than a close suburb of Paris but which then was a bucolic haven for artists.
Getting away from the city in the summer is still a necessary and beneficial habit among Parisians, but was even more so in the case of the Manets during 1881, 1882 and 1883 because they were having a large five-floor immeuble de rapport built on a piece of land they had bought on the rue de Villejust, near the Étoile. On the ground floor, there was to be a high-ceilinged atelier-style drawing room, inspired by a church in Nice which had caught Berthe’s eye, and which would be her workplace; the four upper floors were divided into separate flats. Berthe and her husband at last had enough room to entertain their large circle of friends and acquaintances, who would look after Julie so well once both her parents were no longer around. Eugène’s health was worsening and Berthe’s weekly Thursday evening suppers were an essential source of distraction and entertainment for him because he rarely left the house. Guests included the poet Mallarmé, Monet, Degas, Caillebotte, Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes and even Whistler when he was in Paris. On one particularly memorable evening in 1890, Mallarmé gave his famous Conférence sur Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,13 before an invited audience of between 30 and 40 people including Régnier, Dujardin, de Wyzewa, Madame and Geneviève Mallarmé and, of course, Julie and her cousins Paule and Jeannie Gobillard. The talk went down very well with the guests, except for Degas, who was unable to hide his boredom and left the room, muttering that he couldn’t understand a word of it.14
Julie was allowed, even as a young child, to sit at the ‘big table’ and listen to all these eminent grown-ups, and she was certainly trained from an extremely early age to look at things with a painter’s eye. Her mother took her on trips abroad and encouraged her to visit museums and places of cultural interest. By the time she was 8, the lucky little girl had visited Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands with her parents and spent a summer in Jersey.
In 1887, Berthe Morisot executed the only sculpture15 she is known to have made, a bust in plaster of Julie, for which she had to ask for technical help from her friend, the sculptor Rodin. The work shows a determined-looking child with a near perfect oval face.
While Julie was growing into a healthy and inquiring teenager, her father’s health was fast declining. In 1890, the family spent six months in the country at Le Mézy in the valley of the Seine, and found the country air beneficial to Eugène’s condition, so they returned there the following year. During a long, leisurely ramble one summer afternoon they caught a glimpse of a beautiful seventeenth-century château, surrounded by outhouses and extensive grounds, the Château du Mesnil Saint-Laurent, between Meulan and Mantes. Renoir had told them about this jewel, and needless to say Berthe and her husband fell in love with it on the spot. ‘We have not bought a château; there is one for sale near the village, so extraordinarily cheap that for a moment we had the idea of committing this folly. It is extremely pretty. Eugène was crazy about it and Julie too. But we will be reasonable; the house in Paris is quite enough’, Berthe wrote to Edma in August 1891. But on 29 September, she announced to Mallarmé that ‘the deal was off, but now it is on again’.16 The purchase was a lengthy process and it was not until the winter of 1892, after many hesitations, that it was completed.
Neither Berthe nor her husband lived at Le Mesnil for any length of time and it was let immediately after Eugène’s death because Berthe Morisot felt too upset ever to live there again: ‘It was certainly a find and I have a great satisfaction thinking that someday Julie will enjoy it and fill it with her children. But as for myself, I feel mortally sad in it, and am in a hurry to leave.’17 As we know, it did later become Julie’s home and the centre of her life with her husband Ernest Rouart and their three sons.
A postcard (with a spelling mistake) of the Château du Mesnil, c.1900
In 1892, Julie lost her father, of whom she was exceptionally fond. Berthe Morisot, who had nursed him through the last months of his life, was grief-stricken and never recovered fully from the loss. As she wrote to a friend:
I am ending my life in the widowhood you experienced as a young woman. I do not say loneliness, since I have Julie, but it is a kind of solitude none the less, for, instead of opening my heart, I must control myself and spare her tender years the sight of my grief.18
Renoir’s portrait of Berthe and Julie together, painted in 1894, is particularly telling: Berthe’s dark hair has turned white practically overnight and she turns away from the artist with a sad, world-weary expression, leaving the limelight to Julie, who was 16 and exceptionally pretty. Julie’s childhood and adolescence were saddened by a succession of deaths of friends and relatives to add to her grief for her father. She often reflects on death in a surprisingly mature way for such a young girl and misses her beloved parents every single day, but her youthful optimism and resilience also seem to shine through when confronted with all these painful losses.
Naturally, Julie became her mother’s even closer and more constant companion: her admiration for Berthe knew no bounds and she recorded all her mother’s remarks and thoughts in great and loving detail in her diary. Berthe Morisot must have sensed that her own health was terribly fragile because in April 1892 she named Stéphane Mallarmé as Julie’s guardian and created a ‘family council’ to look after Julie, should any misfortune befall her. In 1893, Julie and her mother moved from the rue de Villejust to a much smaller apartment at 10 rue Weber.19
Julie’s mother’s death in 1895 was much more sudden and brutal than her father’s had been for Julie, who had only ever known him as an invalid. While nursing Julie, who had a bad cold, Berthe caught influenza, which quickly turned into pneumonia. She died on 2 March, leaving a poignant letter in which she took leave of her beloved daughter.20
Julie was now an orphan but, though the future appeared pretty uncertain and bleak, an unusual and modern solution to her problem was to prove very successful. Her cousins Paule and Jeannie Gobillard, who had also been left orphans when their mother, Berthe’s sister Yves, died in 1893, were already living in the third-floor flat in the rue de Villejust. It was agreed by the conseil de famille and Mallarmé that Julie should join them and that the three girls should live there together with a suitable housekeeper, found by Mallarmé, who was installed to keep an eye on this youthful, feminine household. Julie pursued her painting and academic studies and was allowed as much freedom as a young lady of the period would expect to visit friends, go to concerts and enjoy Parisian life. As an only child, she was especially close to her first cousins: Paule Gobillard, also an accomplished artist, who was twelve years older than Julie, and Jeannie, who was virtually her contemporary. Paule remained a maiden aunt figure; having watched over Julie and her own younger sister, she then took care of Edma Morisot’s daughters Blanche and Jeanne Pontillon for many years.
Julie seems to have had a somewhat haphazard education, which was not unusual for young ladies in her milieu. As an only child of what could be considered as middle-aged and rather conservative parents, she was educated at home by an assortment of nannies, tutors, governesses and willing helpers of all kinds, who attempted to teach her the rudiments of French literature, mathematics and English in lessons often shared with Jeannie. Berthe Morisot advised ‘controlled’ freedom as far as reading matter was considered. ‘If I were you I would be particular in the choice of reading – no drivel, nothing sentimental, nothing affected, as many good old French authors as possible. We are all born monkeys before we are ourselves; therein lies the danger of bad examples.’21 Julie read a lot, although she claims the contrary in her diary, mainly books recommended by Mallarmé, Renoir and Degas; with a precocious penchant for adult reading matter and an opinion of her own. For instance, she loved Edgar Allan Poe’s stories but found Delacroix’s Journal a little tedious.
Berthe Morisot had seen to it that her daughter received the required schooling but there is no doubt that Julie’s interest lay elsewhere: she was already devoted to art and painting, and her only desire was to become an artist like her mother and most of the friends who surrounded her. It is debatable whether Julie could have ever become a fully fledged professional artist in her own right: although her work is charming and commercial, often an art historian’s worst insult, it remains very derivative. She just couldn’t get away from Renoir’s influence, and the overwhelming admiration for her mother always cramped her style and stopped her from trying new things. And, unlike Berthe, she was first and foremost a wife and mother and never strove to have an all-consuming artistic career.
Berthe Morisot was very fond of classical music, and this taste she shared with most of her artist friends. Renoir, for instance, had a passion for Richard Wagner, whose portrait he painted in Naples, and claimed to adore his operas, although Jeanne Baudot recounts in her memoirs that on a visit to Bayreuth in 1896 with his friend Caillebotte he became fidgety and bored during a lengthy performance of Parsifal and had the audacity to strike a match so that he could look at his watch.22 We know Degas obviously enjoyed going to concerts and ballets, but it was Mallarmé who most shared Berthe’s love of music. She regularly attended concerts on Sunday afternoons with Julie, at which they would meet Mallarmé, who would be making copious notes in a little notebook he always carried. They would then all stroll up the Champs-Élysées discussing the afternoon’s performance as they went. It was natural that Julie, like most well-brought-up young ladies, should learn to play an instrument: she not only played the flute and the piano but became quite masterly on the violin. Julie spent many hours practising and received weekly lessons from assorted music teachers in musical theory, composition and appreciation, which she often shared with Jeannie. Her favourite teacher was without doubt the young dashing violinist Jules Boucherit, on whom she developed a discreet ‘crush’. The girls often prepared musical entertainments and soirées for their friends and seem to have attempted quite difficult pieces, preferring Berlioz, Gounod, Mendelssohn and Schumann to the more avant-garde music of their day. Julie rarely felt indifferent about music and always had firm personal opinions, whether on the interpretation or on the music itself.
By 1897, Julie seems to have been a very well-informed young lady altogether, keeping up with current affairs, reading newspapers, listening with curiosity to all the different opinions of her mother’s friends, and then reaching her own conclusions. We see this particularly during the Dreyfus Affair, which had become a cause célèbre by 1896, a year after her mother’s death, and which shook France to the core. It is difficult to imagine the impact that the case of Alfred Dreyfus had on the French population at all levels at that time. L’Affaire Dreyfus was, of course, just the culminating event in more than 20 years of anti-Semitic activity in France, and by the mid-1890s the press had bombarded the French with the notions that all evil revolutionaries or corrupt bankers were Jews and that Jews had been responsible for all the misfortunes of France ever since the Franco-Prussian War. Great families who considered themselves to be more French than the French, such as the Halévys, the Haases, the Schlumbergers, the Camondos, the Ephrussis and the Rothschilds, were suddenly viewed with suspicion and thought to be working for the ruin of France. Julie lived daily through this tumultuous time: Dreyfus’s sentence to Devil’s Island, Zola‘s famous letter ‘J’accuse’ in Clemenceau’s newspaper L’Aurore, the revision of the trial, all the ins and outs of the court cases, the case for the prosecution, the case for the defence, and so on.
The country was divided into two distinct camps: the ‘Dreyfusards’ or pro-Dreyfus supporters, who believed in Dreyfus’s innocence, including Monet, Proust, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Natanson, Pissarro and, of course, Zola. Then ‘the anti-Dreyfusards’, including Degas, Paul Valéry, Alexis Rouart, Henri Rouart and his four sons, Jean-Louis Forain and Paul Cézanne, who were sometimes vehemently anti-Semitic but, first and foremost, felt passionately French. Terrible quarrels ensued. Degas, for example, fell out forever with the Halévys, the Camondos and many other long-standing friends. Renoir ‘contrived to be non-committal’.23 His son Jean, in Renoir, My Father, quotes Renoir as declaiming: ‘Always the same camps, but with different names for each century. Protestants against Catholics, Republicans against Royalists, Communards against the Versailles faction. The old quarrel has been revived again. People are either pro or anti Dreyfus. I would try to be simply a Frenchman.’24 But one can’t help wincing at the virulence with which he attacks French Jews in Julie’s diary. Surrounded as she was by anti-Dreyfusards, it is not really surprising that Julie relates Renoir’s disobliging remarks about the pro-Dreyfus and Jewish Pissarro, and Degas’s friends’ rather biased opinions against Dreyfus. However, she also feels deep down that it would be truly terrible if the French people condemned an innocent man.
Julie also enjoyed all the hullabaloo surrounding the state visit of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his Empress to Paris in 1896: she describes the decorations and various celebrations organized by the people of Paris on this occasion and can’t hide her excitement at the firework display, which was said to have been one of the most impressive ever staged in the capital.
Her parents’ friends formed a supportive and generous circle on which she and her cousins could depend for their social life as well as their education. Although Julie always refers very formally to all her mother’s friends (Monsieur Renoir, Monsieur Mallarmé), we know that true affection bound them all together.
Mallarmé, behind his serious exterior and intellectual manner, was an amusing companion. He had found a great friend in Berthe Morisot and, after her death, kept his word as Julie’s guardian: Mallarmé sent Julie little poems, took her to concerts, and invited her to stay near his country house at Valvins on the banks of the Seine. It was a terrible shock when he died suddenly in 1898. Julie was devastated by the loss but tried as best she could to comfort his widow and especially her close friend Geneviève, Mallarmé’s beloved daughter.
Of the original ‘team’, there remained Monet, Degas and, of course, Renoir, who had taken Julie on holiday to Brittany with his family a few months after Berthe’s death. By the time Julie was made an orphan, Renoir had at long last married Aline Charigot,25 acknowledging paternity of their son Pierre, born in 1885. After the birth of their second son Jean in 1894, he seems to have decided on a more stable existence, dividing his time between a home in Paris at the Château des Brouillards, Cagnes in the South of France and Essoyes. In 1893 he had met a doctor’s daughter, Jeanne Baudot, who became a close friend and his pupil as well as godmother to his son Jean: he lost no time in introducing her to Julie and her cousins. They would work all together at the Louvre and gratefully accept advice from the master. Of all the friends who looked after Julie when her parents died, Renoir seems to have been the most fun-loving, and he enjoyed teasing Julie as much as Mallarmé had.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir aged about 50, c.1890
Julie wrote on several occasions about the Monet household at Giverny, where Monet lived with his second wife, Alice Hoschedé; the house was constantly filled with both his and her numerous children and grandchildren. Giverny’s rooms were sparsely furnished in a modern manner and the walls were painted with bright, striking colours that served as a marvellous backdrop for Monet’s collection of Japanese prints, ceramics and oriental rugs. Monet curiously kept a Cézanne in the bathroom, as well as four Jongkinds, three Delacroix, a Degas, a Fantin-Latour, two Caillebottes, three Pissarros, a Sisley, another twelve Cézannes, nine Renoirs and five Berthe Morisots in more conventional places.
Renoir, his wife Aline and baby Claude in 1901
A prosperous-looking and elegant Claude Monet c.1900
The walls of Monet’s studio, where he never painted, were covered with a collection of his own works retracing every period of his life.26 Conversation would be about food and wine and especially the garden, which was Monet’s main concern in the summer.
Degas became something of a recluse in his later years, although he entertained Julie and her young cousins and their friends on a regular basis. He lived in an apartment in the rue Victor-Massé27 with his housekeeper Zoë, who would prepare simple but copious suppers for his friends. In his old age, Degas became crankier and more bad-tempered: he didn’t approve of any newfangled contraptions such as telephones, aeroplanes or even bicycles, finding them ‘ridiculous’; he hated dogs, the country, the sea and especially flowers (the smell rather than the colours bothered him). But Julie loved Degas as one loves a very temperamental, old-fashioned uncle. He was always of sound advice and often showed whimsy and humour. When introducing her to Ernest Rouart one afternoon, he had light-heartedly suggested that it would be a good idea if they got married, and what began as a little joke on his part later became a reality.
Not without a little smug satisfaction, Degas wrote in 1900, after the couple were engaged to be married:
We have Ernest, who after having been timid and cold is becoming nonchalant and hot. On Wednesday, at about a quarter past seven he arrived on foot with Julie at his Oncle Alexis’s home, with such a married air that you would have died laughing. ‘Already?’ I asked. And Julie, who usually opens her mouth just a little bit more than him, seemed just as relaxed as he was. It’s astonishing, as Monsieur Prud’homme28 along with me would say, how men and women are made for each other.29
Julie by Ernest Rouart, just after their marriage in 1900
Degas had every reason to be pleased with his bit of match-making because, a few weeks before this letter, at a soirée at which an extremely young Pablo Casals30 played the cello, Paul Valéry became engaged to Julie’s favourite cousin, Jeannie Gobillard, and Julie was there, of course, with her brand-new fiancé Ernest, whom she would marry in May 1900.
Two pages of Julie’s diary, dated January 1898
