Dual-artist blockbusters, like 2023’s “Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum, typically unfold as head-to-head competitions. The intimate and enthralling exhibition “Manet & Morisot,” at the Legion of Honor, is something else: a mind-meld, merging the spirits and sensibilities of Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, two influential artists who are considered painter’s painters. The show’s catalog even invokes the portmanteau “Marisot” (coined by the French philosopher Fabienne Brugère), as if these two 19th-century artists were a modern-day celebrity couple — and on an artistic level, it fits.

Somehow, “Manet & Morisot” (which travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art next spring) honors the intensity of their connection while also lifting Morisot out of Manet’s shadow. She has sometimes been seen as his muse or student, an imbalance that has as much to do with the way history has treated female artists as it does with Manet’s reputation as the ur-modernist, but here her reciprocal impact on him is undeniable.

Early in the show she appears in Manet’s group portrait “The Balcony” (painted shortly after they first met at the Louvre, through a mutual friend), exuding main-character energy with her fierce gaze. Years later, when her own paintings have established her as a vanguard Impressionist, Manet breaks from his rigid figuration to adopt her more unfinished style.

Their relationship skirted boundaries, even as it abided by the social codes of their well-to-do bourgeois circle. They were close friends who corresponded often and went to the same soirées, passionate advocates for each other’s art, and eventually siblings-in-law (when Morisot, then in her 30s and facing financial precarity after her father’s death, married Manet’s brother Eugène in an arrangement supported by both families). Current events also bonded them; both survived the 1870-71 Siege of Paris, staying behind in the city as many of their friends fled.

Critics have long speculated on a possible romantic attachment in the earlier years of their friendship, but you will not find confirmation in this show or its catalog — only the flickers of sexual tension in some early portraits of Morisot by Manet (notably the suggestively slouchy “Berthe Morisot Reclining”) and a few tantalizing asides in Morisot’s letters to her sister. “Manet teases me incessantly, makes fun of my manners, and I end up finding that, if he were free, I’d be much likelier to fancy him than anyone else,” she wrote. (Manet was already married when they met.)

What is certain is that they tested each other’s limits, as good friends sometimes do. While advising Morisot on a portrait of her mother and sister that was due to be exhibited at the Salon, Manet picked up a brush and painted over substantial portions of the work, leaving Morisot, who had no time to make final adjustments, furious. A few years later Morisot, against Manet’s advice, left the Salon to join the first Impressionist exhibition (although he gave her a warm send-off, lending a Morisot canvas from his own collection to the show).

The strength of their rapport surprises because they inhabited different worlds in modern Paris. Manet was committed to studio painting, whereas Morisot trained with Corot as a landscape painter and embraced the Impressionists’ way of working en plein air. And while Manet could visit cafes unaccompanied and paint the figure in novel and shocking ways, Morisot as a woman and a proper bourgeoise was limited to so-called appropriate spaces and subject matter: mainly interiors, gardens and parks. Manet’s figures square off to the viewer with penetrating stares that border on impertinence, whereas Morisot’s are so fully absorbed in a task (usually reading, sewing or child care) as to seem introverted.

When they pass motifs back and forth, it is always with an inspired twist. Morisot’s “Young Woman at Her Window,” made in 1869 just months after she posed for Manet’s “The Balcony,” reverses the perspective to show the artist’s sister looking out at Paris from behind the shield of an unfurled fan.

A few years later Manet responds to her painting “Woman and Child on a Balcony” (not in the exhibition, unfortunately, but detailed in the catalog), zooming in on the wrought-iron railing and the little girl peering through it and relocating them from parkside Passy to the busy Quartier de l’Europe. The result is “The Railway” (1873), a highlight of the National Gallery of Art’s collection that is one of this exhibition’s key loans. In this painting Manet takes a profoundly empathic look at women who were barred off from the full experience of the modern city, making explicit what is implied in Morisot’s work.

Their friendship endured through personal and professional changes that might have strained many others. The year 1874 stands out as an inflection point, when Morisot’s father died, she had her debut with the Impressionists, and she married Manet’s brother Eugène. Two sketchlike but sensitive portraits of Morisot from this period record the transitions in her life; in one her features seem to buckle with the weight of her black hat and veil, while in another a fan dangling from her hand draws the eye to her glinting engagement ring.

Married life seems to have suited Morisot, whatever her initial reservations. Eugène, who had managed his brother’s career and went on to serve as his wife’s agent and sometime model, appears on canvas as an attentive father entertaining the couple’s daughter, Julie, in their garden. Motherhood limited Morisot’s time to paint, but working more quickly helped her develop a deft, free hand. The strokes in the wildly uninhibited “Woman and Child in a Meadow at Bougival” (1882) are almost cyclonic, engulfing the figures of Julie and her nanny in a tempest of vegetation.

One of the more interesting insights of “Manet & Morisot” (organized by Emily A. Beeny, chief curator of the Legion of Honor and curator in charge of the museum’s European paintings) is that Manet, in failing health by the late 1870s and increasingly homebound, essentially lived within the domestic sphere of Morisot’s paintings. Both were sensitive painters of still lifes, generally dismissed as feminized “housekeeping pictures” by critics of the day.

And both artists depicted women in their private dressing rituals, as seen in the most symbiotic pair of works in the exhibition: Manet’s “Before the Mirror” (1877) and Morisot’s “Woman at Her Toilette” (circa 1879-80), both of which frustrate the viewer’s gaze with turned backs, obscured mirrors and a protective netting of brushwork.

The chronology of influence is complicated, as it often is in their exchanges. Manet started his mirror painting first, but only exhibited it a week after seeing Morisot’s at the 1880 Impressionist Exhibition — and his handling of paint is uncannily similar to hers, with loose, angular strokes and fuzzy edges in place of his usual bold contours. The pink and blue palette is hers as well; black, a Manet signature, is nowhere to be found in this painting.

Works toward the end of the exhibition show both artists obsessing over the figure of the “Parisienne,” a widely reproduced female archetype that had come to represent the city and modernity itself. A strange and charming collaboration takes shape, resulting in a group of half-length portraits titled after the four seasons. “Summer” and “Winter” are Morisot’s; “Spring” and “Autumn,” Manet’s. The conversation is an open-ended one; “Autumn” was unfinished when Manet died, in 1883, and the four pictures have never been shown together until now.

The show, too, feels incomplete in that some essential works are missing. Among them are Manet’s “Repose,” a spectacular full-length portrait of Morisot that belongs to the RISD Museum and was in the Met’s “Manet/Degas”; and Morisot’s “Woman and Child on a Balcony,” from the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, which inspired Manet’s “The Railway.” That’s not to sound ungrateful for the numerous loans that are here, or for the comprehensive catalog that includes illuminating correspondence from both artists.

In a letter to her sister in the days after Manet’s death, Morisot reminisced on “the longstanding friendship that bound me to Édouard, a whole past, our youth, or work, all collapsing.” She became a custodian of his legacy, buying pictures from his posthumous retrospective at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and paying tribute in her own paintings. Her “Before the Mirror” of 1890 not only calls back to Manet’s painting of the same title, but also includes his portrait “Berthe Morisot Reclining” in the background. On her own deathbed, in 1895, she wrote in a letter to her daughter: “You shall tell M. Degas that if he founds a museum, he is to pick a Manet.”

If a single work in “Manet & Morisot” can be said to describe their complicated but compelling relationship, it’s a small portrait Manet painted of Morisot in 1872, just a few years after they met. In “Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets,” artist and subject (really, artist and artist) lock eyes across the canvas in a startling moment of mutual regard.

The museum goes so far as to call the work “uncannily reminiscent of self-portraiture,” underscoring that the key dynamic in this show isn’t romance, or even friendship, but something perhaps rarer: recognition.

Through March 1 at the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 100 34th Avenue, San Francisco; 415-750-3600, famsf.org.