RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA. December, 2018

Regal House Publishing is pleased to announce the March 15, 2019 release of La Luministe: Berthe Morisot, Painter of Light, about the artist who survived the siege of Paris—and the love of Édouard Manet—to become the sole female founder of the Impressionist movement.

If Frida Kahlo was “a ribbon around a bomb” (according to André Breton), Berthe Morisot was a fist inside a velvet glove. In 19th century Paris, an haute-bourgeois woman was expected to be discreet to the point of near-invisibility. But Berthe, forbidden to enter L’École des Beaux Arts, started the art movement that broke open the walls of the art establishment. And, unable to marry the love of her life, Édouard Manet, she married his brother. While she epitomized femininity and decorum, Morisot was a quiet revolutionary.

Berthe Morisot was a fist inside a velvet glove…

While she epitomized femininity and decorum,

 she was a quiet revolutionary.

As an Impressionist, she created light-infused paintings of women in reverie that the other members of the group deemed the most avant-garde work of them all. They called her La Luministe, the painter of light. Her portraits depict women lost in thought, not as objects of the male gaze but possessing an interior life. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl says, “Morisot is a visual poet of womanhood like perhaps no other painter before or since.” (The New Yorker, 10/29/2018) Please use the above contact information for a review copy of the book.

Author Paula Butterfield taught courses about women artists for twenty years before turning to writing novels about them. La Luministe, her debut novel, earned the Best Historical Fiction Chanticleer Award. Paula lives with her husband and daughter in Portland and on the Oregon coast. Still committed to sharing women’s stories, she is currently working on her next book about rival American artists.