In the rush to right the historical gender balance, galleries have been corralling neglected women artists into group exhibitions: the Whitechapel Gallery rounded up 80 women abstract expressionists for its recent Action, Gesture, Paint show. But imbalances can’t be corrected retrospectively. Rather than elevating women artists who didn’t make it in a male-dominated world – not all of whose work, if we’re honest, helps the female cause – we should be celebrating the grit and talent of the few who did. And Berthe Morisot and Gwen John – currently the subjects of solo shows at Dulwich Picture Gallery and Pallant House – had both in spades.

In a new biography, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, Alicia Foster, curator of the Pallant House show, dismantles the myth of John as a timid recluse: from the moment she left her hometown of Tenby to join her younger brother Augustus at the Slade in 1895, then abandoned London for Paris, John was a woman in full charge of her destiny. After an introductory room of London paintings, the show presents her in the context of the intimisme of Vuillard and Bonnard and the modernism of Cézanne. What’s remarkable, in this company, is how her work stands out. Her pictures don’t clamour for attention – they’re too reserved for that – but they command it with the contained energy of their draughtsmanship and the perfection of their tone. Beside her interiors Vuillard’s looks fudged, Hammershoi’s cold; she translates the prosaic into poetry.

In France she reinvented herself as French, furnishing her ‘Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris’ (c.1907-9) with the statutory wicker basket chair and lace curtain to filter the light that now entered her paintings. Her portraits of women in interiors have an interiority missing from paintings by male artists who make them part of the furniture, an interiority that deepened after her break-up with Rodin and her conversion to Catholicism in the 1910s. A commission from the local convent in Meudon for a series of large portraits of Mère Poussepin, founder of the order, led to a patchier style of brushwork she called ‘blobbing’, but the sense of collectedness in her female sitters was a constant.  She hoped her art would endure ‘because I am patient and recueillie [collected] in some degree’, perhaps unaware that it was the fragility of its collectedness that lent her work its tension – strained almost to breaking point in her breathless ‘Self-portrait with a Letter’ (c.1907-9) for Rodin.

Acceptance for the Salon d’Automne in 1919 at the age of 43 seemed to confirm John’s transformation into a Parisienne, but her nomination as a salon associataire was disallowed for not being French; the ‘Brown Betty’ on a French wine-tasting table in a wartime painting is a giveaway. There were never any doubts about the Frenchness of Berthe Morisot, a student of Corot whose first landscapes were accepted for the Salon in 1864 when she was 23. In her day, though, the obstacles to a professional career as a woman artist were even greater. If a landscape like ‘In the Bois de Boulogne’ (1879) looks swiftly painted, it’s because it had to be. Her model reported at 6.30 a.m. so that Morisot’s ‘effets’ could be finished by nine to avoid snoopers.

Although she married late at 33 and had her first and only child at 37, Morisot didn’t need solitude in order to work, like John. She painted in the white Louis XVI-panelled salon of the house she and her husband Eugène Manet built in the rue de Villejust: her interiors are not obliquely-lit Montparnassian attics but airy spaces flooded with shifting light from south-facing windows, replicating plein air effects indoors.

It was Morisot’s good fortune to emerge at a moment when everyday subjects considered suitable for bourgeois women were being appropriated by avant-garde men. Urged by Degas, who admired her draughtsmanship, to show in the first impressionist exhibition in 1874, she fitted in with a bunch of outsiders none of whom had attended the École des Beaux-Arts from which her sex excluded her. Her inclusion gave ammunition to critics. ‘There’s also a woman in the group,’ reported Albert Wolff in Le Figaro in 1876. ‘In her case, a feminine grace is maintained amid the outpourings of a delirious mind.’ Eugène had to be stopped from challenging Wolff to a duel.

The grace had antecedents in the 18th century. So many critics compared Morisot to Fragonard that Mallarmé’s quip that she was his great-grand-niece was accepted as fact. Her pictures hang at Dulwich alongside works by Fragonard and Boucher – an artist whose ‘extreme impropriety and yet adorable grace’ she found irresistible – and Romney and Gainsborough, whose works she discovered on her 1875 honeymoon in England. The latter had a laxative effect on her brushwork. The influence of Constable and Turner on impressionism is often touted, but Morisot’s debt to Gainsborough is a revelation. Obvious once you know.