PARIS.- The Musée Marmottan Monet is hosting the first exhibition ever dedicated to Julie Manet (1878-1966). Over one hundred works are on display, featuring paintings, sculptures, pastels, watercolours, and engravings, from museums all around the world, as well as private collections, including many pieces presented to the public for the first time. All serve to retrace the life of Julie Manet, the only daughter of the first female Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot, and niece of illustrious painter Édouard Manet. The aim of the exhibition is not only to evoke Julie Manet’s childhood amongst the Impressionists but also to lift the veil on her own private life and showcase the love of art that she inherited. The exhibition presents the extraordinary collection that she amassed with her husband, Ernest Rouart, and highlights that which was her life’s mission: to ensure that her mother and uncle gained the recognition they deserved. In order to retrace eight decades of a truly remarkable life and reveal its many facets, the exhibition extends beyond the spaces usually dedicated to temporary events and takes up residence in the Rouart Galleries located on the first floor, endowing the exhibition with an unprecedented scale.

Ground Floor
Julie Manet, from early life to an Impressionist heritage

The first part of the exhibition evokes Julie Manet’s childhood. The opening section entitled “An Impressionist Education” presents some of the best-known portraits of an individual who could be described as a born model. She was the model of predilection of her mother who sketched her in watercolours in the grass (Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet), in Bougival with her father Eugène Manet (Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet), a painting shown at various Impressionist exhibitions. She posed on her own at eight years of age in 1886 for Jersey bleu and for Rêveuse in 1894. Renoir dedicated several paintings to her. L’enfant au chat (Paris, Musée d´Orsay) is the oldest and undoubtedly the most well-known. The painting, as well as two sketches in the same format, are being exhibited here for the first time. Also on display are portraits of Julie Manet, one painted, representing her alone (Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet), and the other in pastel showing her in the company of Berthe Morisot (Paris, Musée du Petit Palais). Following her mother’s death, Renoir watched over Julie and her two cousins Jeannie and Paule Gobillard. All three of them posed for the master. Julie and Jeannie, cousins as inseparable as sisters, posed together for Le chapeau épinglé (private collection). Paule, slightly older at age ten was the subject of a sanguine drawing, also shown here for the first time (private collection). Two paintings depict the passions of Berthe Morisot’s nieces. In one, the Impressionist, who had taught painting to Paule, depicts her as an artist, Paule Gobillard peignant (Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet). In the second, Julie depicts Jeannie as a virtuoso pianist (private collection) in a harmony of pastel and iridescent tones. Opposite these portraits, a section is dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé. Édouard Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé (Paris, Musée d´Orsay), and a collection featuring Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, The Raven (private collection), translated by the poet and illustrated by the painter, bear witness to their close relationship. The painting of Mallarmé’s boat La Voile Blanche, sailing on the Seine at Valvins by Berthe Morisot, for its part, also testifies to the close ties between the first female Impressionist and the man of letters. It was he whom she chose as Julie’s surrogate tutor, and he was the one to give her the greyhound called Laërte, captured in a painting by Morisot in 1893. He was also the one who penned the sonnet Julie au chapeau Liberty, inspired by the last portrait of Julie sketched by her mother (private collection).

Orphaned at sixteen, Julie took on the sad title as the last representative of the Manet family, shared with the painter’s widow, her aunt Suzanne Leenhoff. Their relationship is evoked through the latter’s portrait by Manet, La femme au chat (London, Tate Modern), presented not far from Manet’s drawings and sketches given to Julie by her aunt on her sixteenth birthday. These works are on display here for the first time. A spectacular painting, Baigneuses en Seine (São Polo, MASP), which Julie reproached her aunt for having certified as Manet’s,—she believed the background to have been altered circa 1899—illustrates the differences of opinion between the two women regarding the exercise of the artist’s copyright.




At the age of nineteen, Julie fell in love. Just as her mother had met Manet at the Louvre, Julie met her future husband, painter Ernest Rouart, there in 1897. La Vierge au lapin (Paris, Musée du Louvre) Jupiter et Antiope (Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet) copied by Manet after Titian, Le repas chez Simon sketched by Berthe Morisot after Veronese (Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet), and the copy done by Ernest Rouart based on Minerva expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue by Mantegna (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), all executed in the Louvre, illustrate the unique place held by the museum in the family’s history. On 31 May 1900, Julie Manet married Ernest Rouart.

Julie now began to pose for her husband. Several of these portraits can be seen here, including Portrait de Julie Manet peignant (private collection), Portrait de Julie Manet (private collection) and L’heure du thé. The couple’s commitment to promoting the arts was exemplary. Julie piously preserved the significant artistic legacy she had inherited, including the portraits of Mr and Mrs Auguste Manet (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), two portraits of her mother by Manet (Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts and Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet), and one of her father, Eugène Manet, by Alphonse Legros, presented here for the first time. From the turn of the century onwards, Julie strove to promote her mother’s work. With the assistance of relatives, she convinced several museums to accept a donation of Morisot paintings. L’été was given to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, Sur le banc to the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, La fleur aux cheveux to the Petit Palais in Paris, Pasie cousant dans le jardin de Bougival to the Musée de Pau. Thanks to the involvement of friends of Renoir, Paysanne niçoise was acquired by the Musée de Lyon. In 1912, the couple acquired a large number of works from the collection of Julie’s father-in-law, Henri Rouart. These acquisitions featured 17th and 18th-century works by Poussin, Fragonard and Hubert Robert, as well as 19th-century pieces from Delacroix, Corot, Jongkind, Daumier, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas, Redon and Gauguin. Shortly thereafter, Julie Manet and Ernest Rouart, with the agreement of Henri Rouart’s other children, made a number of significant donations to the Louvre: La Dame en bleu by Corot (Paris, Musée du Louvre) and Crispin et Scapin by Daumier (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) were donated in 1913. In 1930, Julie fulfilled one of her mother’s dearest wishes, when Manet’s La Dame aux éventails entered the Louvre, which Morisot had acquired in 1884 with this purpose in mind. It took forty-six years of patience and two generations of women, as well as the determination of a mother and daughter, to bring this project to fruition. A woman of conviction, Julie was also a woman of faith. She was a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, like her husband, her cousin Jeannie (now Madame Paul Valery), her first cousin Gabriel Thomas, and Maurice Denis, whose Magnificat (private collection) and Baptême du Christ (private collection) she admired greatly. Posing for her husband, she made use of a paintbrush to produce a portrait of her grandchildren. For the eldest grandchild, Jean-Michel, she made a touching handwritten bible-study book with watercolour illustrations. Up to the very end of her life, Julie Manet remained faithful to her principles. In 1943, in memory of her late husband, she donated Tivoli, Les jardins de la villa d’Este by Corot (Paris, Musée du Louvre) but retained the copy that her mother had done in her younger years (private collection). A gatekeeper of the Impressionist spirit, she remained faithful to her lifelong friends. In 1957, she acquired one of Monet’s large-format Water Lilies. Through her life and work, Julie Manet safeguarded the memory and legacy of the Impressionist movement.

Galeries Rouart: Julie Manet, Painter and Diarist

It is impossible to evoke Julie Manet without addressing the question of her painting and her famous diary. Both can be seen on the first floor. While Berthe Morisot’s daughter never considered herself a proper artist, she nevertheless painted and sketched all her life. The paintings at the Musée Marmottan Monet focus mainly on the period 1895-1900 when Julie worked under Renoir’s guidance and instruction. These include Femme avec Laërte, exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1898, and Avant le bal painted on the rue de Villejust where we can see her cousin Edmé Pontillon in a doorway. Les Cygnes and La cueillette des pêches explore a theme dear to her mother, and bear resemblances to her mother’s work by means of their technique.

The various editions of Julie Manet’s diary, written between 1893 and 1899, and published in 1979, are presented alongside the original typescript and an unpublished manuscript by Jeannie Gobillard. One hundred and twenty pages refer to the series of events leading from the cousins’ engagement up to the double wedding, with Jeannie Gobillard describing everything Julie Manet does not: the declarations of love in the home of Degas, the visit to Passy cemetery and the role of the Impressionists in their lives and fate as women. This work is the subject of a prefaced publication, annotated and illustrated with unpublished photographs, co-published with Éditions des Cendres. On the wall, views of Mesnil signed by Julie’s husband and cousin Paule illustrate the bucolic and warm atmosphere that Julie fostered at the Château du Mesnil, a property also inherited from her parents.