ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network Research Forum:

The Domestic Salon-Studios of Berthe Morisot and Odilon Redon

Dr. Allison Perelman, independent scholar

Thursday 20 November 2025

 1700 (GMT) // 1800 (CET) // 1200 (EST) // 0900 (PST)

At the height of their careers, neither Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) nor Odilon Redon (1840–1916) employed a separate workroom as a studio. Instead, each produced art in spaces coextensive with the domestic salons of their family residences. Despite the parallel use of salon-studios, Morisot’s and Redon’s contemporaries interpreted their arrangements in distinct terms, initiating patterns that have since been perpetuated in much scholarship. Morisot’s peers aligned her domestic setting with the traditional practices of amateur women artists. In contrast, Redon’s supporters equated this arrangement to writers’ habits of working at home, thus recasting the salon-studio as a manifestation of his literary tendencies. By analyzing their studios together, this talk provides a more nuanced understanding of the shared values between aesthetically disparate, but equally innovative artists of separate gender identities. Moreover, it sheds light on Morisot’s own agency and her deft navigation of the codes of behavior imposed on bourgeois women of her time. 

Allison Perelman completed her dissertation, “Private Space, Public Self: Studios of the Avant-Garde in Fin-de-Siècle France,” and earned her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2025. Prior to her graduate studies, she served as the dedicated research associate for nineteenth-century exhibitions in the Department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago, including Van Gogh’s Bedrooms (2016) and Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist (2017). Her writing has been published by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Oxford University Press, and Thames & Hudson.