Eva Gonzalès

Eva Gonzalès (April 19, 1849 – May 6, 1883) was a French Impressionist painter.

Eva Gonzalès was born in Paris into the family of the writer Emmanuel Gonzalès. In 1865, she began her professional training and took lessons in drawing from the society portraitist Charles Chaplin.

Gonzalès became a pupil of the artist Édouard Manet in February 1869. Manet is said to have begun a portrait of her at once which was completed on 12 March 1870 and exhibited at Salon in that year.

Like her teacher, Édouard Manet, she never exhibited with the Impressionist painters in their controversial exhibitions in Paris, but she is considered part of the group because of her painting style. She was Manet's only formal student and modeled frequently for several members of the Impressionist school. Gonzalès posed for Manet in 1869 for the painting Portrait of Mlle Gonzalès, a work which has previously been discussed more than Gonzalès' oeuvre at her own 1885 retrospective and at Galerie Daber's exhibition for her work in 1950.

While studying under Manet, Gonzalès self-portraits suggest she was exploring her individuality and identity as an artist by presenting subtle correctives to Manet's version of her. Until 1872, she was strongly influenced by Manet but later developed her own, more personal style. This can be seen in works such as Enfant de Troupe (1870), which is a nod to Manet's Le Fifre (1866), while many of her later paintings involved portraits of her sister, Jeanne.

During the Franco-Prussian War she sought refuge in Dieppe.

She married the graphic artist, and Manet's engraver, Henri Guérard in 1879, and used him and her sister Jeanne Gonzalès as the subjects for many of her paintings.

One such painting is Une Loge Aux Italiens (1874), which depicts a male and female figure, modelled after Gonzalès' husband and sister, in the box of a theatre. This was a subject matter frequently chosen by Impressionist painters, and there are many direct references to Manet's work. The female figure is pale-skinned and wears a light blue dress that sets a sharp contrast against the dark background, reminiscent of works by Manet such as The Balcony (1868) or even his famous Olympia (1863). The flowers in Une Loge Aux Italiens also seem to have been quoted from the bouquet in Olympia. There are also clues that Manet might have been directly involved with the creation of this painting, as there is a pastel sketch version of this work that was made by him.

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