The Cradle

1870–1874

The watercolour years

Oil painting is still difficult for Morisot and she works mostly in watercolour: her palette is restrained, the delicate repetition of hues creates a balanced effect, and the translucent atmosphere and feathery touch give her pictures their freshness.

1872

Durand-Ruel buys twenty-two paintings

Morisot's mature career begins in 1872: she finds an audience in the private dealer Durand-Ruel, who buys twenty-two of her paintings.

15 April – 15 May 1874

The first Impressionist exhibition: the only woman

The Salon rejects a work by Morisot — for the last time: she never submits anything to it again. Instead she joins the “rejected” painters — Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley — at their first exhibition, in the studio of the photographer Nadar, showing ten works and remaining the only woman among the exhibitors; the Le Figaro critic Albert Wolff writes of “five or six lunatics, one of whom is a woman”.

1874

Marriage to Eugène Manet

In 1874 Morisot marries Eugène Manet, the brother of her friend and colleague Édouard Manet. She goes on exhibiting under her full maiden name, using neither a pseudonym nor her married name.