When Edouard Manet's painting Olympia is hung in the Salon of Paris in 1865, it is met with jeers, laughter, criticism, and disdain. It is attacked by the public, the critics, the newspapers.

A similar dynamic is at play in the series of portraits Édouard Manet painted of Berthe Morisot in the two or three years after 1871, when political violence exploded in France and changed the co ...