The critics called Berthe Morisot's work charming. They meant it as a cage.

Morisot was born in Bourges in 1841 into a family that supported her ambition far more than her society did. She and her sister Edma studied painting seriously. She trained under Corot. Her early work was accepted by the Official Salon — a distinction many of her future colleagues could not claim. She was a technically accomplished painter before she was twenty-five.

The Kingmakers operated on two fronts. The first was institutional. Women were barred from the École des Beaux-Arts, the main art training ground in France. They were excluded from the informal café networks where the Impressionists sharpened ideas against each other. They could not move through the city with the freedom male painters took for granted. The subject matter available to Morisot was narrowed by social constraint before she ever picked up a brush.

The second front was critical language. The same loose, gestural, confident brushwork that made Monet radical made Morisot feminine. Charming. Delicate. The diminishments were applied specifically to her and specifically because of her sex. They were not descriptions of the work. They were a strategy for containing it.

In 1874, Morisot was the only woman to exhibit in the first Impressionist exhibition. She showed in seven of the eight total. She was not a peripheral figure who benefited from proximity to the movement. She helped build it.

She died in 1895 at fifty-four. The market spent the next century proving she had been right about everything by steadily raising prices on the work the critics called decorative.