At the Musée Marmottan last week a chance to really see Morisot: a whole room of the paintings; a smaller room with fifteen watercolors and a selection of works she owned; drawings by the artist and by members of her family; and a special exhibition of paintings from private collections that contained several further canvases.

       
Struck, afresh, by the strange quality of paint as she used it. Very thick, the strokes seeming to hang almost like banners in the air, sometimes gauzier as curtains, but sometimes veritable stripes, and yet the works are of great transparency, luminous and fresh, the air always dewy, a light breeze stirring.



Some of this she worked out from Corot, one of her early teachers and a good friend, whose thick greens also manage to be ever-light and full of air.  Some of the weight she had from Manet, the painter she probably worked in closest conjunction with, a lifelong companion in art, and in family life, since she was married to his brother.  But where Manet is deliberately opaque, Morisot is spacious, and a peculiar kind of space, as if interior to the paint itself.  The text at the Marmottan acclaims her, in my view rightly, one of the great watercolorists of her day, and suggests that her practice in watercolor influenced her objectives in paint.  This seems plausible but does not really begin to answer the question: how?