Linford, SarahGeorgi, KarenDi Fino, Giulia2024-05-302024-05-302021Di Fino, Giulia. "Negotiating Public and Private Identities: Berthe Morisot’s "The Wet Nurse and Julie" (1879) Berthe Morisot’s The Wet Nurse and Julie (1879) ". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2021.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/71Thesis (B.A. in Art History)--John Cabot University, Spring 2021.The French painter Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) provides a perfect case study to examine the negotiation between the artistic ambitions and the personal identity of a female Impressionist. Although many feminist art historians have argued the ways in which women artists opted for a compromise between artistic practice and social demands, examining this experience, and its impact on personal identity has been overlooked. Hence understanding private and deep inner realities in relation to both context and to one’s own stylistic evolution have rarely been taken into consideration. This is the reason why this thesis attempts, first, to look at Morisot’s The Wet Nurse and Julie (1879) with regards to Impressionism, and in the relation between her claims to inner emotional instability and her dissolution of forms. This internal turmoil is not examined in psychoanalytic terms, but in social ones: it seems to stem in part from the anxiety provoked by social factors such as the wet industry, the anonymity of modern workers and the “cult of true womanhood”. The internal struggle that Morisot expresses, in her writings and painted works, and the way in which Morisot tried to find a compromise between professional identity and personal life — which culminates, she states, in becoming an affectionate mother — is analyzed in depth from the point of view of the tensions and negotiations apparent in The Wet Nurse and Julie. Indeed, by observing how Morisot emerged professionally in the artistic circles of the late 19th century and how this generated feelings of uncertainty and loneliness allows us to understand Morisot’s claim to have found self-fulfillment in marriage and motherhood. For Morisot, public and private identities found their angle of repose in a careful negotiation of self, art and family.vi, 85 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Berthe Morisot, 1841-1895Wet nurse and Julie (Berthe Morisot, 1841-1895)Thesis