[1] Brought up largely in Paris, Edma Morisot received a bourgeois education, like her sisters Yves and Berthe, that included piano and drawing.

[2][3] Edma and Berthe both wanted to pursue their training further, which led them to take lessons under the well-regarded painter Joseph Guichard, a former student of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

[4][5] According to Armand Forreau's 1925 biography of Berthe Morisot, Guichard is said to have warned their mother: "With natures like those of your daughters my teaching will not confer the meagre talent of genteel accomplishment, they will become painters.

[2] The Morisot sisters soon tired of copying the old masters, and in 1860 they began to study with the Barbizon painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, who taught them to paint en plein air.

[7] In 1863, when Corot became too busy to continue to instruct them, Edma and Berthe came under the tutelage of another Barbican painting, Achille François Oudinot.

That year, she painted a remarkable portrait of her sister Berthe (now in a private collection), which shows her concentrating in front of her canvas.

She painted a portrait of her husband and executed some pastel copies of Berthe's work, but other artistic production during her marriage remains unknown.