This month, we’ll be featuring Summer of Love , a four-part series on artists who painted the same individual—over and over and over again. The relationships between the two range from muse to lover to daughter, with no two cases the same.

Still less famous than her adored Impressionist sister Mary Cassatt, the Parisian painter Berthe Morisot had some solid bragging rights: She was a founding member of the Impressionists and participated in all but one of the group’s eight exhibitions. And that singular absence, at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in 1879, was not for lack of artistic output. Morisot physically couldn’t take part in the show because she was recovering from the birth of her only child, Julie Manet. (The following year, as if to make up for the lost opportunity, she came back with a vengeance, contributing a whopping 15 paintings and watercolors.) With time, Julie—the reason Morisot was forced to blemish her perfect Impressionist exhibition participation record—became her mother’s most frequently painted muse.

Morisot was neither a mother nor a married woman when she began her Impressionist career during the spring of 1874, lending four paintings, two pastels, and three watercolors to the Impressionists’ watershed first exhibition. Painting was the top priority for this independently wealthy 30-something spinster, and so even though she had begun a relationship with Eugène Manet (younger brother of 19th-century avant-garde artist Édouard Manet), she was in no rush to settle down.

But a few months after that 1874 exhibition, Morisot decided to marry Manet (himself a painter, who heartily supported his wife’s more impressive career). And within four years, at what would have then been considered a ripe old age, a 37-year-old Morisot gave birth to Julie on November 14, 1878.

“Well, I am just like everybody else!” Morisot wrote to her sister, Yves, after Julie’s arrival. “Your (baby) is a darling; you’ll find mine ugly in comparison, with her head as flat as a paving stone… All poor Julie has to offer is her fat cheeks and her pretty complexion.”

Another brutally honest letter, penned by Morisot a few months later, added that Julie “is like a big inflated balloon… My daughter is a Manet to the tips of her fingers; even at this early date she is like her uncles, she has nothing of me.” With time, Morisot’s views changed. She painted her daughter repeatedly, from chubby toddlerhood to graceful adolescence, and she features in almost a third of the artist’s 1000 paintings, watercolors, and pastels.

Reinventing the family portrait

Morisot first painted Julie when she was around a year old, but not in a way you’d expect (especially if you’re using today’s picture-perfect maternal Instagram feeds as a yardstick). Instead of creating a conventional family portrait or a self-portrait with her young daughter, she painted Julie seated on her nanny’s lap. Morisot was, after all, a painter long before she was a mother.

In another early painting of Julie, Morisot painted what looks like a modern-day Madonna and child except the woman nursing the baby isn’t the baby’s mother—she’s a wet nurse (a hired hand common in upper-class French families at the time). “Certainly, this painting embodies one of the most unusual circumstances in the history of art—perhaps a unique one: A woman painting another woman nursing her baby,” wrote late art historian Linda Nochlin of the boundary-pushing work. “One might say that this… poignantly inscribes Morisot’s conflicted identity as devoted mother and as professional artist, two roles which, in nineteenth-century discourse, were defined as mutually exclusive.”

These pinkish portraits are seductively sweet, showing a girl being cared for by a team of attentive women (and are painted by the mother who loved her, of course). But they are also the product of a woman at work who happened to also be a mother. (Morisot was not the only Impressionist to take a paintbrush in the name of her offspring; Pierre-Auguste Renoir created adoring images of his son, Jean, and later of his grandson, Claude.)

Morisot pioneered another type of portrait, too—that of father and daughter. She often painted Eugène and Julie together, a new take on the standard posing of a wife and children created by a male artist. Mothers posed with their kids, and fathers usually posed with their sons (if at all); the father-daughter combo was natural in the Morisot-Manet household, but not yet in the history of art.

The keeper of the Morisot legacy

Julie Manet’s time with her parents was cut short by illness; she lost her father to poor health at age 13, and her mother three years later to typhoid fever. Orphaned by age 16, Julie moved in with cousins on her mother’s side of the family.

She inherited a considerable artistic birthright; friendships with big-name Impressionists who were household fixtures throughout her childhood (recounted in her published memoir, Growing Up with the Impressionists); portraits of her painted by her uncle, Édouard Manet, and family friend, Pierre-Auguste Renoir; plus a considerable cache of her mother’s paintings.

Julie became the keeper of her mother’s legacy. She donated works to French museums so that they could be seen by the public and helped organize exhibitions of Morisot’s work. Even though Julie’s birth kept Morisot from participating in that Fourth Impressionist Exhibition, without her, there might not have been as devoted a champion keeping Morisot’s work in the limelight.