View Long-Hidden Morisot and Bracquemond Paintings in St Louis

Hidden from public view for decades, a cache of landscapes by Marie Bracquemond and sisters Edma and Berthe Morisot is finally going on display.

At the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), the sweeping “Women Impressionists and the Land” brings together more than 70 works, largely from the final decades of the 19th century. To date, most shows focusing on the talents of female Impressionists have lingered on their domestic subjects. These works, however, reveal that the very act of painting en plein air shaped the identities of the era’s female painters and that the nature they chose to highlight often differed from their male counterparts.

“Some of the most radical landscape imagery in the Impressionist movement was painted by women, from Berthe Morisot’s paintings which are radical in their proto-abstract quality to Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, whose practice has been obscured by that of her famous stepfather,” the show’s curator, Simon Kelly, said over email. “Many of the landscapes by these women have also been thought to be lost or remained in private collections until recently.”

When the show opens at SLAM in October, a full gallery will be devoted to Bracquemond, who was widely acclaimed and exhibited during her lifetime, but whose husband’s persistent criticism forced her to retire and eventually fade into obscurity. Here, two previously unseen works from the Musée d’Orsay are going on view for the first time.

The undated Paysage (Landscape) and Femme à la Fenêtre were among the 170 works that Bracquemond’s descendents donated to the French museum in 2024. They’re joined by Still Life with Oranges (ca. 1880), which was presented by the Paris-based gallery Pavec at TEFAF Maastricht back in March. Painted at a time when Bracquemond was participating in the Impressionist exhibitions (at Edgar Degas‘s behest), the still life offers a table encircled by pink foliage rendered with dynamic brushwork.

First-time museum appearances have also arrived from the collection of Bill Scott, the contemporary American painter and longtime collector of women Impressionists. The new discoveries include a clutch of Edma Morisot canvases, among them Souvenir de Campagne (1864), Women in Woods (ca. 1860s), and Ville d’Avray (1863).

The works bear out the sisters’ penchant for painting trips through the lush wooded countryside of northern France in the early 1860s. Edma’s newly unveiled paintings offer the imprint of their Barbizon teacher, Camille Corot, in watery works dripping with atmosphere.

“Independent travel by women was still viewed as socially unacceptable in the mid to late 19th century and, if women did travel, they were expected to do so with a chaperone,” Kelly said. “But the exhibition suggests that women landscape painters actually traveled more during these years than we have traditionally thought.”

Elsewhere, the long-hidden Washerwoman (ca. 1863) by Berthe shows an early interest in a subject she would revisit in the coming decades. Today, Berthe is the better known of the sisters, but not on the grounds of talent—as with Bracquemond, Edma’s marriage effectively ended her painting career.

“Several art critics as well as Corot proclaimed their shared belief that, without doubt, Edma was the superior and more promising painter of the two,” Scott said. “In books, her name remains a footnote, but if the paintings were seen together, perhaps Edma’s name would also be associated with something more resiliently visual.”

Spread across seven galleries, “Women Impressionists and the Land” will take a broadly chronological approach. It begins within the confines of the Salon in the 1860s before looking at how women artists including Rosa Bonheur and Berthe Morisot challenged such conventions.

The exhibition will close with Mary Cassatt‘s paintings at Château de Beaufresne, the 17th-century hunting lodge that she purchased in 1894. She cultivated it to her tastes, blending French and English gardening styles and building a studio around the estate’s large pond. As with Claude Monet, Cassatt brought the natural world close and bent it to her needs, as in Mother and Child in a Boat (1908), which recalls a Renaissance altarpiece stripped of religious symbolism and infused instead with an attention to nature.

“Women Impressionists and the Land” is on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive, October 17, 2026–January 10, 2027.