Berthe Morisot at the Dulwich Picture Gallery is worth a deviation from familiar paths

London is a vast buffet of sightseeing delights, but most locals exist on a limited diet. I, for example, have worked in the City for more than 15 years and know many of its nooks and crannies. To my husband,

resolutely a Clapham lad, the City is almost as alien as a foreign country. I, however, am baffled south of the river, where he is at ease.

Thus I had never managed to get to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, despite its oversized position in the world of art and architecture. Thanks to Berthe Morisot, I’ve finally jumped that hurdle.

Morisot is one of a group of tremendously talented female artists being re-discovered after a male-dominated establishment sidelined them from the traditional pantheon of art history. (Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun are also in this club.) Morisot was an Impressionist, influencing and influenced by familiar names like Renoir and Monet. She even married into the club. Her husband Eugène was brother to Edouard Manet.

Morisot delivers everything people love about the Impressionists: gentle scenes, soft colours, and rapid “unfinished” brushwork that gives the viewer impressions of colour and light. She exhibited regularly with the rest of the Impressionists, yet when she died the majority of her paintings remained in family ownership, meaning she’s probably better known as a model for her brother-in-law than a painter in her own right. This show helps to address that oversight, though perhaps not as powerfully as I would have liked.

The paintings assembled here give a sense of both timeless beauty and a thoughtful insight into the subject matter. We see an almost entirely female world, not so much portraits as vignettes of everyday life. The subjects are captured in moments of pensive contemplation; there’s an almost Vermeer-like quality to many. Women in a state of partial undress are hardly novel for the Impressionists, but when the boys paint them there’s always a simmering sexuality. Morisot diffuses that, giving us a soft innocence. Her work prompts you to contemplate what the subject is thinking rather than what she may be about to do. 

We’re also treated to an impressive range of styles. Morisot as presented here was clearly an experimenter, playing with influences of the painters who came before to try out various techniques and topics. Yet here’s where the exhibition drifts onto shaky ground. Its stated purpose is to examine the influences of others on her art. After the first Morisot-dominated room, the rest of the exhibition is paintings by other artists hung with Morisot canvases they inspired. So confusing is this, and so different from “typical” Morisots, it took me a while to realise that the galleries beyond the first were actually part of the show rather than a return to the permanent collection. While it’s intellectually interesting to see what she came up with when riffing off a Poussin or a Gainsborough, it’s hardly unique. All artists learn by copying others and then developing their own style. This deep dive into influences might be more interesting with someone extremely famous, but I came to this exhibition wanting to learn more about a woman I barely knew, and I don’t feel it did enough of that. 

Still, if you’re interested in either Impressionism or female artists it’s worth a deviation off your usual flight path to take in Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism, which is included in the gallery admission price of £15. You’ll need to hurry up, however. It closes 10 September.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is, as art and architectural history texts would tell you, worth the journey on its own. A Regency masterpiece designed by Sir John Soane and opened in 1817, it was the first art gallery in the world designed with massive glass skylights to light its paintings from the top. This is now so standard it’s hard to imagine that anyone needed to invent it. Almost every major museum in the world has long, rectangular galleries lit from the top with paintings hanging on walls covered with a single contrasting colour. It all started here. The Dulwich prototype is quite small compared to the giants it inspired: just a modest rotunda with a long, rectangular gallery on each side with a long corridor flanking it to the back (this is where the Morisot exhibition is) and some small side galleries and a modest but delightfully diverse gift shop on the front. That centre rotunda leads into a mausoleum designed by Soane for the founders of the Gallery. 

The quality of the permanent collection is due to a business failure the founders would, no doubt, have preferred to avoid. In 1790 the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth commissioned London-based art dealers Francis Bourgeois and Noël Desenfans to procure a national collection of art for him. The two did an admirable job tracking down old masters, assembling a small but impressive pile including Rembrandts, Gainsborough, Vasari, Van Dyck, Veronese, Raphael, etc. It’s a representative short list to match the names you’d find in the National Gallery, the Louvre or the Prado, and better quality than all but a handful of art museums outside of Europe. But the dealers moved too slowly. By the time they’d assembled their collection, a series of wars triggered the partition of Poland and the abdication of the king who’d given them their brief. Stuck with the art as Europe rolled into economic uncertainty and the Napoleonic Wars, Bourgeois and Desenfans never managed to sell their collection on. Instead, they donated it and hired Soane to design a purpose-built gallery amidst a park in the leafy garden suburb of Dulwich. 

If you don’t live in this part of the world, it does take effort to get here. Plan at least half an hour from central London if you know where you’re going, and add 15 minutes if you don’t. I was travelling from the West End, and found that the Victoria Line to Brixton and then the P4 bus to Dulwich village was the fastest route. Rome 2 Rio’s directions were not as quick, but did provide me with a pleasant 20-minute walk along tree-lined streets and impressive parks. I now understand the appeal of this area, and why it’s so pricey. Dulwich feels a long way from urban grime and hustle, and the high street in Dulwich village could just as easily be in Hampshire as inside the M25.

As long as you’re here, you might as well pause for a meal. There’s a cafe just across the park from the entry to the Gallery, obviously popular with local dog walkers. A very short walk brings you to the heart of Dulwich village, where both chains and independent restaurants spill onto the tree-lined street. We ate at Rocca, a cheerful Italian spot that feels particularly authentic in the summertime because windows across the front slide back to make the whole restaurant alfresco. We opted for salads … fresh, crunchy and abundant in their ingredients … and glasses of rose. An excellent selection of wines by the glass adds to the ambiance.

Being brutally honest, for the average foreign tourist it’s probably not worth spending the time and money to visit a variation on the much larger collection you can see in the National Gallery for free. But if you live in or around London and you’ve “done” all the major museums, this is well worth an excursion. Drift off those familiar paths, become a tourist on your home turf and discover something new.