I was preparing myself for an upcoming visit to the Palace Legion of Honor in San Francisco to see the Manet and Morisot show. It taken more than four years to develop, contacting museums and collectors, to be able to present the original paintings side by side. The reason for the show is to view the impact of the two artists upon each other.

Edouard Manet was by far the most famous or successful painter. He was already recognized by the salons of Paris. Berthe Morisot and her older sister Edma were trained by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, who famously said, “I know nothing, I only paint what I see.”

Morisot also spent quite sometime in the Louvre with the copyists, learning to paint like the masters. Her sister married a naval officer and quit painting, so Berthe continued alone and had some minor successes.

Edgar Degas introduced Morisot to Manet on a personal level, Manet was well aware of the Morisot sisters, and knew of their paintings. Manet then offered to use Berthe as a model for a painting he called “The Balcony”. It was the first of dozens. Morisot continued to paint and with constant contact with Manet it was apparent that she learned a few things. It was the typical one way, master to student, relationship. Or was it?

The show points out the Manet appeared to study what Morisot was doing and started to compose works similar to Morisot. It is really a fascinating story of the Impressionist period of art.

The curator of the show, Emily A. Beeny, gave a wonderful talk on YouTube that I highly recommend, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSIOkcvFcWE

And this video got me thinking about the “copyists”, there is hopefully a book about them, but I haven’t researched this yet. I did ask Chat GPT to tell me all that Ai knew about the copyists, the following is from Chat.

“For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, museum galleries were full of easels. The air smelled of oil and turpentine. These were the copyists—artists with permission to set up in front of the masters and reproduce their works stroke for stroke.

They weren’t mere hobbyists, though some were students. For many, it was the only affordable way to study technique firsthand: to learn how Rubens handled flesh, or how Velázquez pulled atmosphere out of shadow. Others made a living from it. Wealthy patrons would commission “museum copies,” since the originals were untouchable. A few of those copies still hang in old homes, quietly passing as heirlooms.

Paris’s Louvre was the epicenter. You could apply for a permit, choose a painting (if it wasn’t already claimed), and work there under the eyes of guards and the public. Copyists became part of the museum’s rhythm—visitors saw both the finished master and the act of its replication. In a sense, they were living annotations on art history.

It was also a strange ecology of authorship. Some copyists became famous in their own right—Berthe Morisot began by copying in the Louvre before joining the Impressionists. Others disappeared into anonymity, their brushwork swallowed by the name they were copying.

Today, a few institutions—like the Prado, the Uffizi, and the Louvre still—allow limited copyist programs. The number is small, but the tradition persists, half ritual, half apprenticeship.

They were the quiet ghosts of the galleries. You’d see them early—before the tourists—carrying easels, smocks rolled under one arm, small tins of paint clinking in bags. They’d claim a spot beneath the same painting, sometimes for weeks, like monks returning to their altar.

Many were students from the École des Beaux-Arts or local ateliers, but plenty were older—failed portraitists, widows, retired craftsmen, immigrants trying to prove they belonged in a language they couldn’t yet speak. They’d paint until their backs ached, then step aside to compare their color against the original under different light, squinting, muttering to themselves.

It wasn’t romantic work. It was devotional. To copy meant to listen with your eyes—to find the pulse inside another’s brushstroke. Some grew so intimate with a single painting that they could recite every crack in the varnish, every odd pigment change. The guards got to know them, too; there are stories of friendships that lasted decades, of guards keeping a favorite’s spot “reserved.”

And always, a small audience would gather. Children staring at two versions of the same Madonna; an old couple whispering about which looked more alive. For a few minutes, the copyist and the master shared the same frame.

When photography and prints took over, the copyists dwindled. But their way of seeing—slow, reverent, disciplined—lingers in the bones of anyone who’s ever tried to learn by mimicry.”

This is what I have been doing with scans, creating Convivial Digital Images, CDI.