You see the distinction in her pictures of fashionably dressed Parisiennes, who are not spectacles but bodily presences in dresses that feel rendered from the inside. Well, there’s this to be said for the tag: Morisot is a visual poet of womanhood like perhaps no other painter before or since, with a comprehension of female experience that is at least equal in force to the combined delectations of women by her male peers. Courtesy Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images The strategic irritant of “Woman Impressionist” will wear away. Today, she is the most interesting artist of her generation, for feats of form and depths of meaning that were still developing when she died from pneumonia, in 1895, at the age of fifty-four. She was a painter’s painter, but only by default. Manet kept three of her paintings in his bedroom. Born in 1841, Morisot first showed at the Paris Salon in 1864-initially with works influenced by teachers she had, chiefly the Barbizon master Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot-and figured prominently in all the annual Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886, except that of 1879, when she was too ill, after the birth of her only child, Julie, to participate.

(Imagine a parallel case: say, “Georges Braque: Man Cubist.”) But I see the polemical point of the emphasis as the defiant flipping of, yes, sexist condescension to a great artist who is not so much underrated in standard art history as not rated at all against the big guns of Impressionism: Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Monet, each of whom was a close friend and admiring colleague of hers.

There’s something disheartening-a note of special pleading-about the subtitle, “Woman Impressionist,” of a breathtaking Berthe Morisot retrospective at the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia.

Berthe Morisot by Malika Bauwens