I first read the letters Édouard Manet wrote to his family in the winter of 1870-1871 on a dead summer afternoon in an air-conditioned college library in Sydney. I was 19, studying art history.

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 ...