In February 2013 a vibrant 1881 portrait of a red-haired woman in a straw hat sold at Christie’s for 10.9 million dollars, making its painter the highest-priced female artist in auction history. Back in 1874 a prominent French critic had described the same artist as one of five or six lunatics on display. This episode follows Berthe Morisot from her birth in 1841 into an affluent family descended from Fragonard, through a polite education meant to stay a hobby, to her role as the only woman in the first Impressionist exhibition.

Barred from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she reverse-engineered the masters by copying at the Louvre under a chaperone, met Manet and Monet there, learned plein air painting from Corot, and was accepted into the Paris Salon by 1864, only to walk away from it in 1874. We look at how her sister Edma’s marriage ended their creative partnership, how critics used her gender to dismiss the whole movement as feminine, and how the domestic sphere she was confined to became the subject of radical technique: unprimed canvases, single-stroke faces, mixed media, Japanese asymmetry, and a late synthesis method built on tracing paper.

• Why a wealthy woman could not simply enroll in the best art academy in Paris
• How The Cradle elevated women’s inner lives to the status of high art
• The marriage to Eugene Manet and the gossip that distracts from her innovations
• Exhibiting only under her maiden name and missing just one show, to give birth
• Her final letter to her daughter Julie and the 1890 notebook entry on equality