Julie Manet
Eugénie Julie Manet was a French painter, model, diarist, and art collector.
Biography
Born in Paris, Julie Manet was the daughter and only child of artist Berthe Morisot and artist Eugène Manet, younger brother of painter Édouard Manet. The death of both parents within a three-year period left her orphaned at the age of 16. As a result, she came under the guardianship of the poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and went to live with her cousins. She also received support from the family's artist friends, Renoir in particular.Throughout her life Julie posed frequently for her mother and other Impressionist artists, including Renoir, her uncle Édouard and her cousin Paule Gobillard.
Book
Her teenage diary, published in English as Growing up with the Impressionists, provides insights into the lives of French painters, including Renoir, Degas, Monet, and Sisley, as well the 1896 state visit of Tsar Nicholas II and the Dreyfus Affair, which was then raging in France. Her diary "faithfully records—and concurs with—Renoir's relentless anti-Semitism ".Work
She was taught painting by her mother, Berthe Morisot, and later become a painter herself. Her mother died of pneumonia when Julie was 16, in 1895, and left her with large fortune.In May 1900 Julie married the painter and engraver Ernest Rouart, artist and son of the painter Henri Rouart. The wedding, which took place in Passy, was a double ceremony in which Julie's cousin Jeannine Gobillard, married Paul Valéry.
The couple had three children, Julien, Clément and Denis. Soon after marriage the couple undertook a restoration and redecoration of Chateau du Mesnil and painted murals. Later she also designed porcelain plates with butterflies and other insects as motifs. She devoted her life to keep the legacy of Impressionists and especially her mother alive. Together with her husband she organized many crucial exhibitions, such as Édouard Manet exhibition at the Tuileries in 1932, Edgar Degas exhibition in 1937, and Berthe Morisot’s show of 1941. In 1961 she published the very first catalog of Berthe Morisot's works. Her son, Denis Rouart, art historian and curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Nancy, wrote the preface to the work.
She is sometimes called the Last Impressionist, or the Last Manet. Her sons Julien and Denis inherited some of her mother's paintings, now in the Marmottan Monet Museum. Denis Rouart edited The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot with her family and her friends.