Marie Bracquemond (1840 – 1916) was a French Impressionist artist, much influenced by Claude Monet.
Marie-Anne-Caroline Quivoron was born in Landunvez, Brittany in 1840. Her family moved to Paris, where Marie began painting. While studying and copying a Rembrandt in the Louvre, she met a French painter and engraver named Félix Bracquemond. In 1869 she married Félix.
Marie Bracquemond's work was first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1874. While her husband's artistic tastes were conservative, Marie loved the colorful, bright works of Monet and Renoir. She participated in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1879, 1880, and 1886. Many of her best-known works were painted in her garden at Sèvres.
Although her fame was overshadowed by that of her well-known husband, the work of the reclusive Marie Bracquemond is considered to have been closer to the ideals of Impressionism. According to their son Pierre, Félix Bracquemond was jealous of her talents and was often resentful of her, brusquely rejecting her critique of his work, and refusing to show her paintings to visitors.
Famous art critic Gustave Geoffrey stated that Bracquemond was "one of the three great ladies of Impressionism". Marie was never able to achieve the same level of fame as the other two (Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot) because her overbearing, jealous husband oppressed and suppressed her, eventually forcing her to quit painting completely around 1890.
She died in 1916 in Sèvres, a suburb of Paris.