The Cleveland Museum of Art is presenting “Manet & Morisot,” the first exhibition dedicated to the creative exchange between French painters Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, on view through July 5, 2026. Organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art, the show examines how the two artists influenced each other’s work over more than a decade of close professional and personal association.

Manet, often called the father of modern painting, and Morisot, one of the few professional women artists working in France in the 1870s and 1880s, occupied different positions within the Impressionist circle, but their dialogue shaped both careers. Morisot, who worked primarily outdoors, is credited with influencing Manet’s looser brushwork in his later paintings; Manet, who favored studio painting with layered revisions, encouraged Morisot to incorporate more figures into her landscape compositions. Among the works on display are Manet’s “Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets” (1872), his “Boating” (1874–76, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Morisot’s “Woman at Her Toilette” (1875–80).

CMA curator Heather Lemonedes Brown, who specializes in Modern European Art, described the exhibition as taking “a very fresh and different approach looking at the dialogue between the two,” and noted that Morisot’s achievement as a working professional in that era was “extremely rare.” After Manet’s death in 1883, Morisot and her husband — Manet’s younger brother Eugène — acquired a significant portion of his estate. The Cleveland Museum of Art is at 11150 East Boulevard.

Source: WVXU / Ideastream Public Media