The major intervening event in Manet’s life between his last paintings of Victorine and Gare Saint-Lazare was his meeting with Berthe Morisot, the only woman he painted with more frequency than he painted Victorine. As an upper-class lady who was also an avant-garde painter, Morisot collapses the two worlds that seem to be in opposition in Manet’s paintings of Victorine. Morisot also incorporated the sexual and sensual into bourgeois life for Manet for perhaps the first time. They almost certainly had romantic feelings for one another, and Manet’s paintings of Morisot show an easy, comfortable sensuality that is absent from the earlier paintings of Victorine. In Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, also painted in 1872, for instance, Manet revisits the close-up portrait he did of Victorine, but this time instead of harsh scrutiny met with resistance, there is a sense of connection. Morisot’s eyes are a warm brown, the shadows around her eyes soft and rounded. Her gaze is intimate in a way Victorine’s never is. In Morisot, perhaps, Manet finally found the integration of sexuality with bourgeois life, the resolution to the conflict that so disturbed him in his early paintings of Victorine.
This intimacy, this sense of connection through family (Morisot eventually married Manet’s brother) also found its way into Gare Saint-Lazare. Interestingly, Armstrong reads the painting as part of a dialogue of “balcony scenes” between Morisot and Manet, with Morisot a domesticating influence that turns Manet’s alienated adults of The Balcony (1869) into a connected mother-daughter pair in one of her watercolor sketches (Armstrong 205). By inserting Victorine, emblem of the conflict resolved by Morisot, into Morisot’s painting, Manet pays subtle homage to her influence on his life. Intriguingly, the clothing Victorine wears in Gare Saint-Lazare, (black hat, V-neck dress edged with white lace) is almost exactly the same outfit Morisot wears in Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets. In the old tradition of dressing Victorine in costumes, Manet has dressed Victorine as Morisot herself. As in Fifer, Victorine and the anarchic bohemian sexuality she represents has been incorporated into the context of Morisot, assimilated to the bourgeois world and the bourgeois female role of motherhood.
Left: Manet, Edouard. Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Right (detail): Manet, Edouard. Gare Saint-Lazare. National Gallery, Washington, DC.