Manet & Morisot: friends, colleagues and collectors in San Francisco
From October 11, 2025, to February 1, 2026, the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco presents the exhibition “Manet & Morisot”
Source: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco · Image: Berthe Morisot, “Reading”, 1873. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund 1950.89
This is the first major exhibition ever dedicated to the artistic exchange between the French Impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. Manet was the era’s great pioneer of modern painting, and Morisot, the only woman to exhibit under her own name in the original Impressionist group. Supported by spectacular loans from international museums and private collections, Manet & Morisot will illustrate the ever-evolving nature of an artistic friendship at the heart of Impressionism.
The two painters were friends, colleagues, collectors of each other’s work, and, after Morisot’s marriage to Manet’s brother in 1874, family. The story of their relationship has often been told through Manet’s early portraits of Morisot, with Morisot’s own work treated as an offshoot of Manet’s. More recent scholarship, however, reveals that, although Morisot looked to Manet for inspiration and approval during her early career, by the final years of his life, Manet had begun to follow Morisot’s example, emulating not only her choice of subjects and high-keyed colors, but also her rapid, fluttering brushstrokes. Rich in new research, the exhibition will recast this celebrated artistic friendship—and, by extension, the story of modern art—in a fresh light.
