| Abstract | Sometimes referred to as “the daughter of Impressionism” because of her unique connection to members of the Impressionist group, Julie Manet was surrounded by art from the moment she was born. Her mother, Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, was instrumental in Julie’s artistic education and taught her to draw and paint from a young age. Orphaned at sixteen, Julie took to making art with renewed fervor after her mother’s death in 1895. This thesis treats Julie Manet as a nineteenth-century female artist and investigates how she used art in a manner distinct from how bourgeois women of this era typically utilized art. Instead of practicing art as a pleasant pass-time, Julie’s motivation for making art involved processing her grief after the loss of her mother and carrying on her family’s artistic legacy. By bringing Julie Manet’s work into conversation with the practices of Claude Monet and Marie Bashkirtseff, I seek to reframe how Julie Manet’s work is viewed by scholars. Instead of categorizing them as the inconsequential musings of an amateur, I seek to draw out their significance as to how they reveal one woman’s artistic approach to loss and life. |
