Of the six Impressionist painters whose first exhibition scandalized and fascinated Paris in 1874, Berthe Morisot was the only woman. She reached a pinnacle of artistic achievement despite the restraints society placed on her sex, adroitly combining her artistic ambitions with a rewarding family life. Anne Higonnet brings fully to life an accomplished artist and her world.

Berthe Morisot

Arts & Photography

Higonnet, Anne

History & Criticism

Harpercollins

Of the six Impressionist painters whose first exhibition scandalized and fascinated Paris in 1874, Berthe Morisot was the only woman. She reached a pinnacle of artistic achievement despite the restraints society placed on her sex, adroitly combining her artistic ambitions with a rewarding family life. Anne Higonnet brings fully to life an accomplished artist and her world.

Biographies & Memoirs

Joséphine Bonaparte, future consort of Napoléon; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, cast off the rigid clothing regime of the past. Overcoming forced marriages and imprisonment during the Terror, they became the first self-made fashion celebrities. From one year to the next, the Three Graces led a rebellion against corsets, petticoats, and enormous skirts. Their flowing garments not only embodied freedom for modern women, but also marked the emergence of global capitalism, shopping culture, and the rise of powerful style influencers. Joséphine combined the style of Black women from her Caribbean childhood with garments from India and Kashmir to fuse cultures and bend gender rules. Her best friend and style collaborator, Térézia, celebrated the female body and her own erotic independence. Juliette pioneered a radical minimalism, posing for portraits in pure-white, virginal gowns. After the French Revolution, a conservative reaction would keep women "buttoned up" for two centuries, making the fashion-forward story of the Three Graces even more resonant today.

Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution

Arts & Literature

W.W.Norton&Company

If any book of art criticism has the potential of becoming a bestseller, Pictures of Innocence is it. With her customary clarity of both thought and prose, Anne Higonnet, author of a biography of Berthe Morisot and Berth Morisot's Images of Women, examines childhood, cultural ideals, and popular and artistic images of children. She is both brilliant and careful in her analyses of paintings, photographs, and sculptures and the times in which they were made.
 Pictures of Innocence--with l00 illustrations that range from Caravaggio's raunchy Cupid to Edward Weston's luminous, analytical nude studies of his son Neil to anonymous family Christmas-card snapshots--is the kickoff title in what is billed as "a new series of books about controversial themes and issues in the arts that cut across traditional disciplines." Higonnet marshals masses of material to develop her argument that the way we look at children and childhood is changing, and that this change affects our judgment of art, freedom of expression, sexuality, privacy, consent, exploitation, and child abuse. 
 "Pictures of children are at once the most common, the most sacred, and the most controversial images of our time," Higonnet writes in her introduction. Her concerns are not confined to the most obvious ones. In chapter 1, "The Romantic Child," Higonnet writes, "The image of the Romantic child replaces what we have lost, or what we fear to lose. Every sweetly sunny, innocently cute Romantic child image stows away a dark side: a threat of loss, of change, and, ultimately, of death." 
 In "Photographs Against the Law," Higonnet points out that "since the early 1980s, photography has been increasingly implicated in the crime of sexual child abuse." Carefully tracing this thread, she asks at one point, "Why photography? Because photographs can and do document actions." It comes down to the fact that a photograph (in this case, one by Dorothea Lange) "originated in the act of clicking a camera at a real person."
 This complex, brilliant book will educate anyone who reads it. In its balanced, minutely detailed discussions of difficult issues, it illuminates issues that have heretofore been swamped in passionate but subjective rhetoric. --Peggy Moorman

Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Interplay)

Thames&Hudson

INTERPLAY: A series that addresses controversial themes and issues in the arts. The ideal of childhood innocence is perhaps the most cherished concept of modern Western culture, all the more so because it seems to be under siege. Pictures have always been crucial to that ideal, and now they promise to transform it. Pictures of Innocence begins by tracing the visual history of ideal childhood: the pictorial invention of childhood innocence in eighteenth-century portraits, its diffusion in nineteenth-century popular paintings and illustration, and its culmination in today's best-selling and most widely practiced forms of photography. It deals with pictures of many sorts, ranging from eighteenth-century portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds to greeting cards by Anne Geddes, from the controversial photographs of Lewis Carroll to those of Sally Mann. The book then turns to the crisis in the ideal of childhood innocence. Ever since its invention, photography has unsettled the certainties of ideal childhood, not only by revealing its inherent tensions, but also by showing how the uses and interpretations of photography can eroticize children. These increasingly acute difficulties have recently provoked a dramatic reaction in the form of sweeping child pornography laws. At an intersection between the history of ideas, art, popular culture, censorship, and law, Pictures of Innocence shows how we are in the midst of a radical redefinition of childhood itself, a turbulent change in fundamental cultural values inaugurated by images.

University of California Press

Berthe Morisot takes her place today as a founder of Impressionism and a leader in women's history. Like her colleagues - Cassatt, Degas, Monet, and Renoir - Morisot sought to represent the experience of modern life, a project that for her entailed rethinking what it meant to be a woman in the nineteenth century. Through close attention to the artist's work and its context, Anne Higonnet shows how Morisot transformed her femininity and its visual culture into Impressionist paintings.Higonnet presents a clear picture of visual traditions that, though very much a part of Morisot's world and work, figure only marginally in art history. Amateur picture making, for instance, was enormously popular among nineteenth-century women. Higonnet locates Morisot's origins in this private practice, then traces her reactions to an industrialized feminine imagery characterized by consumption and dominated by the fashion plate. This discussion provides a background and context for Morisot's imagery, but also helps to explain the look of her pictures.Focusing on formal choices - poses, props, composition, and especially brushwork - Higonnet compares Morisot's images of women with those of Cassatt, Degas, and Manet and details the emergence of her stylistic and thematic individuality. She also shows us the critical themes of Morisot's late work: her self-portraiture, her attempts, with Cassatt, at painting the female nude; and her pictorial explorations of the mother-daughter relationship.Skillfully combining social history, art criticism, and psychological insights, this engaging and abundantly illustrated volume renegotiates the boundaries of art history as well as the terms of women's self-representation.

Berthe Morisot's Images of Women

Harvard University Press

Like her colleagues - Cassatt, Degas, Monet and Renoir - Berthe Morisot sought to represent the experience of modern life, a project that for her entailed rethinking what it meant to be a woman in the 19th century. Through close attention to the artist's work and its context, Anne Higonnet shows how Morisot transformed her femininity and its visual culture into Impressionist paintings. Higonnet presents a clear picture of visual traditions that, though very much a part of Morisot's world and work, figure only marginally in art history. Amateur picture making - enormously popular among 19th-century women - and industrialized feminine imagery dominated by the fashion plate provided a background and context for Morisot's imagery. Focusing on formal choices - poses, composition, brushwork - Higonnet compares Morisot's images of women with those of Casatt, Degas and Manet. And she examines critical themes: Morisot's self-portraiture; her attempts, with Cassatt, at painting the female nude; and her pictorial explorations of the mother-daughter relationship.

Individual Artists

Berthe Morisot has taken her place as a founder of Impressionism and a leader in women's history. Like her colleagues - Cassatt, Degas, Monet, and Renoir - Morisot sought to represent the experience of modern life, a project that for her entailed rethinking what it meant to be a woman in the 19th century. Through close attention to the artist's work and its context, Anne Higonnet shows how Morisot transformed her femininity and its visual culture into Impressionist paintings.

Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women

A man of many talents, Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford, and a successful author of children's books. Long before he published the famous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll was a dedicated and prolific photographer, creating approximately 3,000 images during his twenty-five years of photographic activity. He is mostly remembered for his exceptional photographs of children, which include portraits of Alice Liddell, the inspiration behind his classic book. Carroll also used to compile his photographs into albums and send them to major cultural figures in Victorian society, in hopes that they might want similar portraits of themselves or their children. His photographs thus include sitters such as the family of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, among others. His work also features portraits of family members and close friends as well as landscapes and still lifes, demonstrating the remarkable extent and complexity of Carroll's photographic art. His work has become embedded deeply in modern culture, influencing many artists. His photographs have seen a recent resurgence in popularity, demonstrating their importance to the history of photography. Carroll is now considered one of the greatest Victorian photographers. Anne Higonnet's thoughtful discussion of Carroll, as a photographer and as a prominent member of Victorian society, offers new insight into his relationships with his sitters in the light of the social conventions of the time. It also emphasizes Carroll s unique, dreamlike vision of childhood.

Lewis Carroll

History

Phaidon Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Higonnet, Anne. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Higonnet, Anne

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Higonnet, Anne. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot

Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution

Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Interplay)

Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Interplay)

Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot's Images of Women

Berthe Morisot's Images of Women

Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women

Lewis Carroll