As a child, Julie Manet – the only daughter of the impressionist painter Berthe Morisot and the sole niece of Édouard Manet – counted Renoir, Degas, Pissarro and Monet among her closest friends. They painted her, taught her to draw and, later, advised her in love. She saw many of modern art’s greatest works take form on their easels.

Woven into this enchanting story, though, is a more tragic one. When Julie – whose life is explored in a new book, and an ongoing exhibition at the Musée Marmottan, Paris – was 13, her father Eugene Manet (Édouard’s younger brother) died. Three years later, Morisot succumbed to influenza. Thereafter, Julie could not escape the feeling, as noted in her diary, that she was “the last of the Manets… one sad girl left to mourn them”.

She was born in 1878, four years after the historic exhibition at which the term “impressionism” was coined, and where her mother was the only woman among 30 exhibiting artists. Although Morisot would go on to show at six of the seven later impressionist exhibitions (only Pissarro managed all eight), in all but the most broad-minded circles she was denied any recognition. “Poor Madame Morisot,” Pissarro wrote to his son, “the public hardly knows her!”

Yet the same social strictures that inhibited Morisot’s career simultaneously helped forge her daughter’s exceptional rapport with the impressionists. Since, for instance, society would have frowned on the idea of Morisot – a haute bourgeoise, turn-of-the-century woman – keeping a studio, or going anywhere to paint unchaperoned, her painting was mostly done at home. And because she could not join Monet and co in the cafés, where the group would discuss the future of art over a drink, she instituted a weekly salon in her apartment. It was, said Renoir, a place where “even Degas became more civil… one of the most authentic centres of civilised Parisian life”.