Berthe Morisot was a founding member of Impressionism and the only woman to show work at the movement’s first group exhibition in Paris in April 1874. She went on to take part in seven of the following eight Impressionist exhibitions, married Édouard Manet’s brother Eugène, and, according to Sotheby’s, outsold Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley at a joint sale at the Hôtel Drouot in March 1875. Her paintings now regularly carry six- and seven-figure estimates at the major auction houses. Her etchings have not kept pace.
That gap between name and market is not new. Mounting the first Morisot retrospective seen in the United States since 1987, the Barnes Foundation put the wider problem plainly in 2018: “Though Berthe Morisot held an important place at the heart of the impressionist movement, she has historically enjoyed far less acclaim than her male counterparts.” Her prints carry a narrower version of the same neglect: she took up drypoint late, in her final decade, made few plates, and seems to have treated them as private work rather than anything meant for sale.
That is starting to change. A run of exhibitions marking the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist show has put her etchings back on gallery walls beside her paintings, even as the secondary market lags years behind the new curatorial attention. What follows traces how she came to printmaking, what survives of it, what her etchings have made at auction, and what is now driving the reassessment.
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Berthe Morisot: the overlooked Impressionist whose etchings are finally getting noticed
A founding member who never had a dealer behind her
Morisot was born in Bourges in 1841 into an upper-middle-class family connected to the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and trained under Joseph Guichard and Camille Corot before first showing at the Paris Salon in 1864. In 1874 she abandoned the Salon altogether, joined the independent group that became the Impressionists, and went on to show with them through most of the 1870s and 1880s despite never achieving, in Sotheby’s words, “financial independence with her artwork”. She married Eugène Manet that year; her only child, Julie, became both her most frequent model and, later, the keeper of her estate.
Credit: Édouard Manet, public domain via Wikimedia Commons
A private, late turn to the etching needle
Morisot did not take up printmaking until her final decade. Her surviving drypoints date mainly from 1887 to about 1890: Julie avec un chat (1887), now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and Berthe Morisot and Julie Manet (about 1888 to 1890), held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The V&A holds a third, Swan and Duck, worked on the plate in 1889 though not printed until 1921, described in the museum’s own record as “studies of a swan and a duck superimposed upon slight sketches of a girl’s head.” A fourth plate, La fillette au chat, shows her daughter Julie with a cat and was catalogued after Morisot’s death in 1895 as B./H. 6, one of the few images that kept circulating in posthumous printings.
Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Prices that have not caught up with the paintings
The gap between Morisot’s reputation and her print prices shows clearly at auction. Sotheby’s listed a Morisot painting, Devant la toilette, at a 2023 estimate of $1.2 million to $1.8 million, roughly £970,000 to £1.5 million. Her drypoints have traded for a fraction of that. Bonhams sold an impression of La fillette au chat in San Francisco in April 2007 for a hammer price of $300, about £150 at the time, catalogued as a second-state impression published posthumously by the dealer Ambroise Vollard. A second impression of the same plate, under the same B./H. 6 reference, sold at Bonhams in Los Angeles in November 2013 for $400, about £250: ordinary posthumous printings, common enough to keep prices modest whatever a painting from the same hand might now command.
Credit: Bonhams
Retrospectives are putting the prints back in the room
Both etching sales happened well over a decade ago, before the current wave of attention on Morisot. The 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, marked across 2024 and 2025, produced retrospectives reopening the case for her as an artist in her own right rather than a footnote to Manet. “Impression, Morisot”, the first major Morisot exhibition held in Italy, opened at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa on 12 October 2024 and ran until 23 February 2025. Curated by Marianne Mathieu, it brought together 86 works, described on the gallery’s own listing as “86 opere, tra dipinti, acqueforti, acquerelli, pastelli”: paintings, etchings, watercolours and pastels shown together rather than the prints held back from the main rooms.
The reassessment continued with Manet & Morisot at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, curated by the museum’s chief curator, Emily A. Beeny, running from 11 October 2025 to 2 March 2026. The exhibition states plainly what it corrects: “Until now, their story has been told primarily as one of Manet’s influence on his female colleague and occasional model, Morisot. Manet & Morisot sets the record straight, exploring these artists’ mutual influence and parallel evolution.” Treating Morisot as Manet’s equal rather than his pupil is the same shift now reaching the quieter parts of her output, including the drypoints she once shared only within her family.
Credit: Jensens, public domain via Wikimedia Commons
What to look for if you want one
Morisot’s prints turn up at auction under a handful of French titles and one standard reference: the B./H. numbers assigned in the catalogue of her prints compiled after her death, the system Bonhams used for La fillette au chat. She etched few plates and rarely pulled her own impressions, so almost everything on the market was printed posthumously, often for Vollard, in runs too small to call editions but large enough that condition and paper stock, more than the rarity of the image, tend to drive price. A proper catalogue entry should state the state, the plate size and the sheet size, and a clean impression on the original wove or laid paper is worth more than a later, greyer restrike.
The last corner of Morisot’s work still priced like an afterthought
Morisot’s paintings have long since closed the gap with her male contemporaries at auction, with individual works now estimated in the seven figures. Her prints have not moved anywhere close. Two Bonhams sales a decade apart, at $300 and $400, are a small sample, but they are also the only verifiable auction record most collectors will find for her etchings, and neither figure bears any relation to the six-figure estimates attached to her paintings in the same years.
What has changed is not the price, at least not yet, but the setting around it. A retrospective in Genoa that hung her etchings beside her paintings, and a San Francisco exhibition rewriting her relationship with Manet, both argue for judging the whole of her output on its own terms rather than as an appendix to better-known men. If that argument holds, the etchings, still priced closer to a curiosity than to an Impressionist original, look like the part of her market that has been left behind the longest.
