On 13 October 1897, Mirra Alfassa married the artist Henri Morisset. She kept the nam'e Alfassa. Henri Morisset, born in Paris on 6 April 1870, was eight years older than she and already had an established reputation as an artist. He had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Gustave Moreau, the Symbolist painter, who taught Matisse around -the same time. Moreau was a liberal teacher who did not impose his own style on his students. Before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1889, Morisset had studied for four years at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Oecoratifs. There his teachers were Bouguereau and Robert- Fleury , who were also professors at the Academie }ulian. Morisset was     at the Academie Julian in 1889, as is shown by a surviving register of male students. It was apparently not uncommon at this time for art students to study simultaneously at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
            We do not know when the Mother met Henri Morisset, but it is likely that she knew him for a few years before their marriage and that he was instrumental in her joining the Academie J ulian. She was introduced to him by her grandmother Mira Ismalun, who had long known Henri's father Edouard Morisset, a noted artist. Mira Ismalun lived much of her life in Egypt. There she was employed to supply the wardrobes of the princesses, which she ordered from the best dressmakers in Paris. She also commissioned portraits of the princesses "to be done from photographs by the painters Vienot and Morisset" . This may have been the origin of her acquaintance with Edouard Morisset. In her reminiscences in 1906, Mira Ismalun enumerated her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, ending with her daughter Mathilde and her family:
             Finally, Mathilde and her husband Maurice Alfassa, who became a French citizen in 1889, have had, after losing a son Max, two children: Matteo, who entered the colonial service on graduating from the Ecole Poly- technique and married Eva Brosse, and Mirra, who married the well- known painter Henri Morisset; I knew his father, and it was I who first took her to their home. They have had a son, Andre.
             Andre was born on 23 August 1898. Earlier that year, Mirra and Henri had been in Pau, a town in the southwest of France, painting murals in a church. The Mother recalled long afterwards:
I remember a good-hearted priest in Pau who had a church-a very small cathedral-and he wanted to have it decorated (he was an artist) .He asked a local anarchist to do it-this anarchist was a great artist-and the anarchist knew Andre's father and me. He told the priest, "I recommend these people to do the paintings." He was doing the mural decoration: there were panels, eight panels, I believe. He said, "I recommend these people to do the paintings because they are true artists." So I worked on one of the panels. It was a church of Saint James of Compostela about whom there was a legend in Spain: he had appeared in a battle between the Christians and the Moors and because he appeared, the Moors were vanquished. And he was magnificent! He appeared in golden light on a white horse, almost like Kalki here. And there were all the slain Moors at the bottom. It was I who painted the slain and struggling Moors, because I couldn't climb up; one had to climb high on a ladder to paint, it was too difficult, so I did the things at the bottom. ...Then, naturally, the priest received us and invited us to dinner, the anarchist and us. And he was so kind! Oh, he was really a good-hearted man! I was already a vegetarian and didn't drink. So he scolded me very gently, saying, "But it is Our Lord     who gives us all this, so why shouldn't you take it?" I found him charming. ...And when he looked at the paintings, he tapped Morisset on the shoulder (Morisset was an unbeliever), and said, with the accent of Southern France, "Say what you like, but you know Our Lord; otherwise you could never have painted like that!"
         The Church of Saint James in Pau still stands, and the mural paintings are intact. Four panels are attributed to Henri Morisset. The one described by the Mother, the lower part of which she painted, is called " Apotheosis" . The other panels done by Morisset are "Vocation" , "Preaching" and "Martyr". The artist referred to by the Mother as "a local anarchist" was, it seems, Joseph Castaigne, to whom some of the paintings in the church are ascribed. The article on Henri Morisset in the Benezit, a French dictionary of artists, mentions the murals at Pau among his important contributions: "We owe him mural paintings, notably for the church of Saint James in Pau." The fact that the Mother has received no credit for her part in the paintings would have been a matter of complete indifference to her .
         After their marriage, Henri and Mirra had a flat in Paris with an attached painting studio. Andre as a small child did not stay with them but with his aunts and his grandfather (Edouard Morisset) in Beaugency on the Loire. Towards the end of his life he reminisced about these places and his parents' visits to the country house:
          My earliest remembrances date back to the very beginning of this century and lack clearness. They centre round two spots. One is Beaugency , a little town on the river Loire, where I lived with two aunts, my father's sisters, my grandfather and my nurse. The other is 15 rue Lemercier in Paris where my mother and father had a flat and their painters' studio which I considered the most wonderful place in the world.
                Beaugency is still vivid in my mind for the garden which was at the back of the house and separated from it by a small courtyard. ...But what struck me most were the visits which mother and father paid to us in their motor car. It was a Richard Brazier and had not to bear a number plate because it could not do more than thirty kilometers per hour. I cannot remember if I took this fact as a big advantage or, on the contrary , the sign of an irretrievable inferiority .My parents used to carry with them a couple of bicycles "just in case" .As a matter of fact, on the first hundred-and-fifty
kilometers trip to Beaugency , the steering gear broke after fifty kilometers, at Etampes, and the car stopped inside a bakery .They stayed there  overnight, used the cycles to visit the place and left the next day, the car having been repaired by the local blacksmith.
                In Paris, my parents leased a flat on the first storey of the house, a fairly large garden at the back of it and a big studio in the garden. The studio had a glass roof high enough for a foot-bridge to link the flat and the studio at first storey level. An inside staircase climbed from the studio ground level to the foot-bridge. It was therefore possible to reach the      studio from the outside either through the hall of the house and the garden, or by climbing to the first floor of the house and getting in the flat, crossing a small drawing room and catching the foot-bridge.
            The Mother painted both in the studio at home and on trips to the countryside. A landscape painting of fields with a church in the background has been identified as a scene at Tavers, a village on the banks of the Loire five kilometres from Beaugency .28 An interior with an antique bed and a flower vase near the window may have been done in the Chateau de Beaugency, near the Morissets' house at 42 Rue du Pont. 29 Rue du Pont leads from the Morissets' house to a big bridge over the Loire, not far away. The bridge represented in a drawing dated 14 November 1907 looks like this bridge.
            The Mother also spoke of having visited Normaridy and done some paintings there. She is reported to have said about the painting of a lady on a staircase,: "This is the interior of the ManoirdeCantepie in Normandy, France. I spent some time there and did some paintings." This painting is dated 1903. The manor house called Manoir de Cantepie has recently been traced in the village of Cambremer in the Calvados region of Normandy, near the sea. Photographs showing an identical floor design and staircase to that of the painting leave no doubt about its correct identification. However, nothing is known about the other paintings said to have been done in the same place.
            The painting of a chair seems to have been done in the studio of Abel Faivre. Faivre (1867-1945) was a painter who studied with Renoir, but he became most famous for his caricatures which were published in many journals.
            The period of the Mother's marriage with Henri Morisset, from 1897 to 1908, was one in which art had a prominent place despite her increasing preoccupation with her inner life. Psychologically, she looked back on these years as a time when the cultivation of the vital being and aesthetic consciousness still predominated, at least from the point of view of the outer, active nature.
            Perhaps the largest number of the Mother's paintings are from this period, though the dating of her early works is often uncertain and many are now lost. She did not pursue "success" in the art world, but she did get several of her paintings exhibited in the Salon de la Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1903, 1904 and 1905. Two of her paintings appeared each year. Morisset had been exhibiting regularly in the Salon since 1898 and probably encouraged Mirra to  submit some of her work. The names of the paintings accepted by the Salon are listed in the yearly catalogues of the exhibitions: "Salon", "Dans I'atelier" (1903); "Nature morte", "Vestibule" (1904); "Bibelots", "la console" (1905). The last-mentioned was included in the illustrated catalogue of 1905. The other paintings have not been identified.
           The Mother's only known reference to the Salon is a somewhat ironical one which suggests that she did not take the pomp of the occasion too seriously. In speaking of the vanity of the vital being and its craving for praise from even the most incompetent sources, she said:
            I am reminded of the annual opening of the Arts Exhibition in Paris, when the President of the Republic inspects the pictures, eloquently discovering that one is a landscape and another a portrait, and making platitudinous comments with the air of a most intimate and soul-searching knowledge of Painting. The painters know very well how inept the remarks are and yet miss no chance of quoting the testimony of the President to their genius.
           This humorous account of the opening ceremony should not be taken as reflecting on the competence of the participating artists or the jury which selected the works exhibited. The Salon was known for its high standards. In some years, so many works had been rejected that a Salon des Refuses, an exhibition of the rejected works, had to be held to appease the outcry .To a certain extent this was due to the conservatism of the official Salon, which from the 1870s onwards forced many of the more progressive artists to exhibit in private shows or in the newly founded Salon des Independants and Salon d' Automne. But the Salon de la societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts remained the Salon in the eyes of most Frenchmen.
           A reviewer of the Salon of 1905 makes passIng mention of Mirra Alfassa while praising the contributions 'of women to the exhibition. He refers to her paintings simply as "silent interiors". This is more a description than a critical evaluation. The context of the phrase does, however, imply some recognition of artistic merit.
           The Mother more than once spoke of the years of her marriage with Henri Morisset as a time when she "lived among artists" .This phase of her life gave her a keen insight into the psychology and character of artists. She was once asked, for example, "Why are artists generally irregular in their conduct and loose in character?" She replied:
          When they are so, it is because they live usually in the vital plane, and the , vital part in them is extremely sensitive to the forces of that world and receives from it all kinds of impressions and impulsions over which they have no controlling power. And often too they are very free in their    minds and do not believe in the petty social conventions and moralities that govern the life of ordinary people. They do not feel bound by the customary rules of conduct and have not yet found an inner law that would replace them. As there is nothing to check the movements of their desire-being, they live easily a life of liberty or license. But this does not happen with all. I lived ten years among artists and found many of them to be bourgeois to the core. They were married and settled, good fathers, good husbands, and lived up to the most strict moral ideas of what should and what should not be done.
           When the Mother referred to this period of her life, it was usu:ally in the most general terms. She seldom revealed the names of individual artists she knew. She did, however, speak of having contact with "the great artists of the day" at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. The Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900 stood out in her memory in this connection. She recalled the artists with whom she associated at this time as being ten to twenty years older than herself, yet she felt privately that she was more advanced in their own field-not in what I was producing (I was a perfectly ordinary artist), but from the point of view of consciousness".
           The Mother's description of the ages of the artists in her circle of acquaintances should be noted. "They were all thirty, thirty-five, forty years old," she said, "while I. was nineteen or twenty". This statement poses problems for those who might wish to associate the Mother with specific names of great artists of the time. Many of the most famous French painters who were alive , at the turn of the century , especially the impressionists and some of the postimpressionists, fall well outside the specified age bracket. Monet, Renoir , Cezanne and Degas, for example, were all around sixty in 1900. Some of these artists, besides, had become reclusive or no longer frequented Paris. Perhaps , the range of ages given by the Mother should not be taken too literally. But it is probable that she was referring in part to artists who were well-known in their own time but whose names are not household words today.
           One name the Mother did mention is Rodin's. Not only did she express a warm admiration for his sculpture, but an anecdote she told suggests that she must have known him quite well. It seems that Rodin was plagued by jealousy between his wife and his favourite model. The situation had reached the point : where it had rather serious consequences for his work. For whenever he was( out of town for a short while, he would leave his clay models covered with wet cloth which had to be sprinkled with water each day. Both the wife and the model, who had her own key to the studio, insisted on performing this function. They would each come to the studio at different times and sprinkle water everywhere seeing very well that it had already been done by the other one. The result was that on his return, Rodin would find the clay running and his work spoiled. He asked the Mother for her advice on this dilemma. From the nature of the problem he put before her, we can infer that he and Mirra were on somewhat familiar terms.
           Rodin, incidentally, was nearly forty years older than the Mother. The     context in which she spoke of him, in a talk of 17 March 1954, is of interest. She had been talking about the fairly common type of artist she had encountered who, when he was seen at his work, "lived in a magnificent bauty, but when you saw the gentleman at home, he had only a very limited contact with the artist in himself and usually he became someone very vulgar, very ordinary" .On the other hand, there were "those who were unified, in the sense that they truly lived their art" .Mention of the latter category , who were generous and good and incapable of cruelty , seemed to bring Rodin to mind. The Mother concluded her anecdote with a description of the great sculptor as she remembered him:
He was an old man, already old at that time. He was magnificent. He had, a faun's head, like a Greek faun. He was short, quite thick-set, solid; he had shrewd eyes. He was remarkably ironical and a little. ..He laughed at it, but still he would have preferred to find his sculpture intact!
              Another artist with whom the Mother seems to have been well acquainted is Matisse who, like her husband, was a student of Gustave Moreau. She did not mention Matisse by name, but in a talk on 9 April 1951 she told a story about a painter she knew who was a student of Moreau. This painter was "truly a very fine artist" and he "was starving, he did not know how to make both ends meet" .The painter later "won a world reputation" and the Mother said to the Ashram children to whom she was speaking: "If I were to tell you his name, you would all recognise it. " The only student of Moreau who attained this kind  of eminence was Henri Matisse. The financial straits of the painter spoken of  by the Mother also tally with Matisse's situation in early life.
Matisse was a few months older than Morisset and they were both studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the early 1890s. After 1900, their careers went in quite different directions. Morisset pursued a successful career within the French art establishment which led to his being honoured in 1912 with membership in the Legion of Honour. Matisse, after an initial hesitation, threw in his lot with the avant-garde. But he had an advantage over many other modernists in that he had thoroughly mastered all that a traditional training  could offer, The Mother liked his work better than most modem art, for "he had a sense of harmony and beauty and his colours were beautiful. " She had little positive appreciation of modem art in general. At best, the Cubists and others "created from their head. But in art it is not the head that dominates, it is the feeling for beauty ." Yet for all the apparent incoherence and ugliness of many of its manifestations, the Mother could detect in the modem art movement "the embryo of a new art" .
The Mother was divorced from Henri Morisset in March 1908. According to her own account, this year marked the end of a distinct phase in her life,the period of predominantly "artistic and vital" development, "culminating in the occult development with Theon" . Art was to occupy less of her attention from this time onwards, though under the stimulus of the beauty of Japan her active interest in painting revived for a while between 1916 and 1920 as she awaited    the final voyage to India. None of her paintings can be dated definitely to the years between 1908 and 1915.
            In contrast to the period of her life among artists, the years from 1908 to 1920 were, as the Mother recollected, a time of "intensive mental development ...especially before coming here [to India] in 1914." This meant not academic study but developing the mind "to its extreme upper limit, where one juggles with all ideas, that is, a mental development where one has already understood that all ideas are true and that there is a synthesis to be made, and that there is something luminous and true beyond the synthesis." Just as the previous stage of the Mother's life had linked her with the artist Henri Morisset, so she now became associated with Paul Richard, a complex and highly 'intellectual personality , with whom she was engaged in writing and editing books and journals and whom (as a legal formality on which he insisted) she married in 1911.

see also

Early Art Studies

Years in the Studio

Théon and Algeria

Sojourn in Japan

Pondicherry
The Later Paintings and Drawings