Berthe Morisot was born on January 14, 1841, in Bourges, France, into an upper-middle-class family that encouraged her artistic education.
Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was born on January 14, 1841, in Bourges, in the Cher département of France, the third of four children of Edmé Tiburce Morisot, a senior government official, and Marie-Joséphine-Cornélie Thomas. Her family later moved to Paris, where the comfortable bourgeois household provided her and her sisters, Yves and Edma, with the leisure and resources to pursue artistic training, a relatively unusual opportunity for women of the era.
From childhood, Berthe demonstrated an aptitude for drawing, and her family arranged private lessons, which was customary for young women of her class though rarely pursued with the seriousness Berthe brought to it. This early access to instruction — including study under academic painter Joseph Guichard and later informal mentorship from Camille Corot — set the stage for a career that would place her among the founding members of the Impressionist movement.
Her birth into a supportive, financially secure family was itself historically significant: it afforded her the freedom, denied to most women of her time, to devote herself seriously to painting rather than being confined strictly to domestic roles. This foundation enabled her later, boundary-breaking participation in the Impressionist exhibitions and her lasting legacy as one of the few women recognized as central figures of nineteenth-century French avant-garde art.
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