Women Impressionists Reframe the Landscape

Mia will present “Women Impressionists and the Land,” bringing together 75 works by Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Marie Bracquemond, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, and other pioneering women artists

Presenting Sponsor: Bank of America

Minneapolis—The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) will present “Women Impressionists and the Land,” a groundbreaking exhibition that expands our understanding of women artists’ contributions to Impressionism. The exhibition brings together approximately 75 paintings, drawings, prints, and decorative arts by Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Marie Bracquemond, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, and other pioneering artists. Developed with contributions from Mia’s curatorial team, the exhibition explores how the women Impressionists drew inspiration from landscapes.

“Women Impressionists and the Land” looks beyond the domestic subjects for which women Impressionists are often best known. Instead, it places forests, waterways, farms, gardens, and parks at the center of their artistic practices, revealing the ways these artists helped reshape modern painting. Open March 6 through June 20, 2027, the exhibition features significant loans from the Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other public and private collections. The exhibition also includes three important paintings Mia acquired in the last year: works by Rosa Bonheur, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, and Berthe Morisot.

“Impressionism is one of the most familiar and beloved movements in the history of art, yet there is still so much we haven’t yet fully understood about the women who helped shape it,” said Katie Luber, Mia’s Nivin and Duncan MacMillan Director and President. “This is the first major exhibition of Impressionist painting at Mia in over 25 years. ‘Women Impressionists and the Land’ invites us to look again, to recognize landscape not as a secondary subject in the work of these artists, but as a place where they experimented, developed their voices, and asserted themselves as professional artists. We are especially proud that Mia and our curatorial team played such a significant role in developing this exhibition and its scholarship, and we look forward to sharing that work with audiences in Minneapolis.”

The exhibition was organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum and curated by Simon Kelly, SLAM Curator and Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, with contributions from Mia curator Galina Olmsted, who is also the author of an essay in the exhibition catalogue. Olmsted’s scholarship contributes to the exhibition’s broader examination of women’s landscape practices and the ways artists including Morisot, Bracquemond, Cassatt, and Hoschedé-Monet have been overlooked or understood primarily through other aspects of their careers.

“For Impressionist painters, the landscape offered a vital means of exploring new possibilities for modern painting. Artists like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who are so often understood through their domestic subjects, were responsible for some of the period’s most innovative engagements with the natural world,” said Olmsted, Mia’s Associate Curator of European Art. “My hope is that our visitors will be dazzled by these works and will understand that landscapes were not peripheral to these artists’ work, but were critical sites of experimentation, professional ambition, and creative freedom.”

Reconsidering the Women of Impressionism

“Women Impressionists and the Land” builds on a growing body of scholarship that challenges the traditional telling of Impressionism. Women painters were essential participants in the movement, and the exhibition demonstrates how these artists claimed the landscape as a space for exploration at a time when their access to public life and artistic opportunities was often constrained. Working outdoors, returning repeatedly to particular places and developing new approaches to light, color, atmosphere and composition, these artists expanded the possibilities of modern painting.

Among the exhibition’s highlights is Berthe Morisot’s Reading (1873), which depicts her sister Edma Morisot-Pontillon reading in a meadow. On loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the painting offers a window into the close relationship between the Morisot sisters, both of whom trained as landscape painters, and their shared engagement with painting outdoors.

The exhibition will also bring together a significant group of works by Marie Bracquemond, whose landscape practice has only recently begun to receive sustained critical attention. The exhibition explores Bracquemond’s artistic practice alongside her husband, Félix Bracquemond, and considers the collaborative and complicated networks through which women artists worked. The exhibition highlights other artists whose contributions remain less familiar to contemporary audiences, such as Edma Morisot-Pontillon, Louise Abbéma, and Élodie La Villette.

Louise Abbéma’s Sarah Bernhardt and Louise Abbéma on the Lake in the Bois de Boulogne (1883), a significant loan from the Collections de la Comédie-Française in Paris, depicts Abbéma and the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt on the lake in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. Abbéma, whose work is not well-represented in American museum collections, offers another perspective on the women artists who engaged with the modern landscape.

A Major Contribution from the Mia Collection

Mia will contribute important works from its own collection to the exhibition, including Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’s Landscape, Snow Effect: le Val near Giverny (1888), a recent Mia acquisition. The painting has undergone conservation and cleaning in preparation for the exhibition. It will be reunited with four other paintings by the artist, offering audiences an opportunity to consider this early masterpiece alongside works made later in Giverny.

Berthe Morisot, The Artist’s Daughter, Julie, with her Nanny (c. 1884), also from Mia’s collection, will be paired with Young Woman Knitting (c. 1883), from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These two paintings share the same model and were painted around the same time at Morisot’s summer estate in Bougival.

Scholarship, Partnerships, and Rarely Seen Works

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, edited by Simon Kelly, featuring essays by leading scholars of Impressionism, including Kelly, Olmsted, Mary Morton, Nicole Georgopulos, Elizabeth Childs, Sylvie Patry, Nicole Myers and Abigail Yoder. The exhibition brings together works from international and domestic public collections as well as private collections, including works that are rarely accessible to the public and, at Mia only, works from important Minnesota collectors.

“Women Impressionists and the Land” will be accompanied by a series of programs at Mia exploring the exhibition’s themes, the artists, their relationship to landscape, and the broader cultural history of women’s artistic practice.

“Bank of America is delighted to continue our longtime partnership with Mia by sponsoring ‘Women Impressionists and the Land,’” said Lucas Giambelluca, Bank of America Twin Cities president. “This major exhibition celebrates the vital contributions of women artists to landscape and modern art history and it reinforces Mia’s value as a cultural asset that strengthens our community.”

“Women Impressionists and the Land” was organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) and is curated by Simon Kelly, SLAM Curator and Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, with support from curatorial assistant Abigail Yoder.

Exhibition Details

For more information on this and other upcoming exhibitions, visit www.artsmia.org.

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About Bank of America

Bank of America is one of Mia’s long-standing partners and has been involved with many projects, including funding the recent conservation of the monumental 16th-century Italian Renaissance tapestry The Meeting of Dante and Virgil, as the Major Sponsor of Mia’s Family Day programming, Major Sponsor of the 2020–2021 exhibition “In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art,” and as Major Corporate Sponsor for the exhibition “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” in 2019.

About SLAM

The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading comprehensive art museums with collections that include works of art of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, ancient American art, ancient Chinese bronzes, and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strength in 20th-century German art. Admission to the Saint Louis Art Museum is free to all every day. For more information, call 314-721-0072 or visit slam.org.

About the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Home to more than 100,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) inspires wonder, spurs creativity, and nourishes the imagination. With extraordinary exhibitions and one of the finest art collections in the country—from all corners of the globe, from ancient to contemporary—Mia links the past to the present, enables global conversations, and offers an exceptional setting for inspiration. Learn more about Mia in our latest Impact Report.

General admission to Mia is always free, but some special exhibitions charge a nominal fee.

For more information, call 1-612-870-3000 or visit artsmia.org. Everyone is welcome. Always.