There’s something disheartening—a note of special pleading—about the subtitle, “Woman Impressionist,” of a breathtaking Berthe Morisot retrospective at the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia. (Imagine a parallel case: say, “Georges Braque: Man Cubist.”) But I see the polemical point of the emphasis as the defiant flipping of, yes, sexist condescension to a great artist who is not so much underrated in standard art history as not rated at all against the big guns of Impressionism: Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Monet, each of whom was a close friend and admiring colleague of hers. Born in 1841, Morisot first showed at the Paris Salon in 1864—initially with works influenced by teachers she had, chiefly the Barbizon master Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot—and figured prominently in all the annual Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886, except that of 1879, when she was too ill, after the birth of her only child, Julie, to participate. Manet kept three of her paintings in his bedroom. She was a painter’s painter, but only by default. Today, she is the most interesting artist of her generation, for feats of form and depths of meaning that were still developing when she died from pneumonia, in 1895, at the age of fifty-four. She is due for full-blown fame. The strategic irritant of “Woman Impressionist” will wear away.

“Self-Portrait,” from 1885. Courtesy Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images

Well, there’s this to be said for the tag: Morisot is a visual poet of womanhood like perhaps no other painter before or since, with a comprehension of female experience that is at least equal in force to the combined delectations of women by her male peers. You see the distinction in her pictures of fashionably dressed Parisiennes, who are not spectacles but bodily presences in dresses that feel rendered from the inside. Rather than look at these women, you adduce what it’s like to be them. Even Morisot’s semi-nudes, painted from models, radiate selfhood, defying objectification. She achieves this effect with intricate and fast brushwork that yields porous, tactile surfaces that absorb the eye and stir sensations of touch. She had the loosest, least finished-looking of Impressionist techniques—a trait that helps explain her neglect, versus the more decisively branded manners of the men, but one that also fascinates. Her paintings, indefinite at first glance, are hard to stop contemplating once you’ve started. It’s as if she had truncated a process of picturing that we, as viewers, irresistibly see through to completion.

“Reclining Woman in Grey,” from 1879. Courtesy Christian Baraja

Morisot began life, in Paris, with a full deck of advantages that she would need in order to buck the odds against female aspiration in her era: money, intelligence, character, beauty, sophistication, charm, and opportunity. Her upper-middle-class family (her father was a former architect and a highly placed civil servant, her mother a distant relative of the rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard) enthusiastically supported her vocation and that of an older sister, Edma. Their parents built a studio for the two girls and enabled them to study with a number of leading artists—crucially Corot, who praised them both (Edma especially). Berthe and Edma served each other as soul mates and, perhaps, when not accompanied by their mother, as mutual chaperones in a nearly all-male art world. Early in the Barnes show, there is an astonishingly strong portrait by Edma (circa 1865) of Berthe painting; she captured her sister in an attitude that strikes me as at once unconfident and unstoppable. Those qualities persisted after 1869, when Edma gave up serious painting to marry a naval officer and moved away from Paris. Berthe was prone throughout her life to self-doubt, and she destroyed many of her works. But she never ceased to push the limits of her ability, seeking sweet spots of personal satisfaction and aesthetic power. Although she had no need of money, she did well in the marketing of her art. Her breakthrough from unadventurous early styles came when she met Édouard Manet, in 1868, and quickly grasped the revolutionary import of his way with paint.

“In England (Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight),” from 1875. Courtesy Erich Lessing / Art Resource

There’s abundant suspicion that Morisot and Manet were in love with each other. His many paintings of her, beginning with “The Balcony” (1868), in which she sits in a white dress behind a green railing, as much as say simply, again and again, “There she is.” She returns his gaze, when she does, with unreadable aplomb. But he was married, and she was careful. In 1874, at the age of thirty-three—late for a woman of that period—she married his younger brother Eugène, forty-one, and a painter, who then set his own career aside to support hers. Eugène appears in her subsequent work as a mild, nice man, at times playing with their daughter, Julie. Morisot painted outdoors when she could, a dicey practice at a time when respectable, unaccompanied women passed their lives under what amounted to house arrest—she was liable to be stared at by passersby and flocked by children. There’s a harbor scene in the show, from 1869, which Manet pronounced a masterpiece—whereupon she made him a gift of it. But the curators—from the Barnes and from museums in Paris, Montreal, and Dallas—concentrate on the portraits and the figurative works that constitute most of her œuvre, while featuring hybrid pictures of interiors with blazing views of the outside world through large windows. By historical good fortune for Morisot, the bourgeois home was becoming a socially and psychologically charged arena for artistic exploration.

“Reading (The Green Umbrella),” from 1873. Courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art

In “The Cradle” (1872), Edma, head propped on hand, pensively regards her sleeping baby through a white veil. The mood is tender but subtly tense. The new mother is transfixed but tired. She may be wondering what she has let herself in for. All Morisot’s treatments of mothers and children, and of children alone, are affectionate enough, but without so much as a whisper of sentimentality. Even her infants register as separate creatures, though years short of being aware of it. (Are they cute? They can’t not be.) In “Cottage Interior” (1886), an eight-year-old Julie focusses intently on the doll that she holds as she stands oblivious of a lovely view of a harbor through a window to her right and, to her left, a large table set for breakfast. (Morisot had planned to paint Eugène at the table, but decided against it.) A knockout portrait of red-haired Julie at sixteen, in 1894, takes apparent inspiration from the Symbolist painters who were then on the rise, notably Edvard Munch, to vivify a slightly sullen, alarmingly beautiful teen-ager. The hint of a new emotional audacity in Morisot’s art, with colors that sizzle and lines that whip, makes her death, in 1895, painfully untimely. (Julie Manet, herself a painter, tended to her mother’s legacy until the end of her own life, in 1966.)

“The Garden at Maurecourt,” circa 1884. Courtesy Toledo Museum of Art

About half of the sixty-eight paintings in the show remain in private collections. But, aside from a few partial failures that instructively exemplify risks Morisot took, they are all more than museum-worthy. Morisot is still emerging from the margins of the Impressionist club of certified alphas, betas, and minions, but the priority for valuing her work is not just the issuing of retroactive membership. It’s re-seeing and rethinking the whole history of modern art from the perspective of women who never stood a chance of major attainment. In a different world, Morisot would be the doyenne of an established tradition that built and expanded on her example. Her subsequent avatars were discontinuous until recently. One who comes to mind is Joan Mitchell, by far the best of the second-generation Abstract Expressionists. She, too, was from a privileged background, but she triumphed on her own steam, with brushwork that is reminiscent of Morisot’s in its alacrity. At times, nearly every stroke seems a sudden, fresh event.

I am not alone in having remarked that most of our present, really engaging young painters are women. It stands to reason. Men have held forth at relative liberty for a few thousand years. They may continue to impress, but they are considerably less likely to surprise than a class of creators whose testimony, with exceptions mainly in literature, has tended to be patronized even when heeded. Let all canons fall until we have this imbroglio sorted out. How does the past century and a half of art register if, as an experiment, we set Berthe Morisot at center stage and look around from there? I think she can handle it. ♦