Growing Up with the Impressionists

Julie Manet, the niece of Eugène Manet and the most famous female Impressionist artist, Berthe Morisot, was born in Paris on 14th November 1878 into a wealthy and cultured milieu at the height of the Impressionist era. Many young girls still confide their inner thoughts to diaries and it is hardly surprising that, with her mother giving all her encouragement, Julie would prove to be no exception to the rule. At the age of ten, Julie began writing her "memoirs" but it wasn't until August 1893, at fourteen, that Julie began her diary in earnest: no neat leather-bound volume with lock and key but just untidy notes scribbled in old exercise books, often in pencil, the presentation as spontaneous as its contents. Her extraordinary diary – newly translated here by an expert of Impressionism, reveals a vivid depiction of a vital period in France's cultural history seen through the youthful and precocious eyes of the youngest member of what was surely the most prominent artistic families of the time.