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 thei ...