Eva Gonzales (1849–1883)

Eva Gonzales was a French Impressionist painter.  In 1865, she began her professional training and took lessons in drawing from the society portraitist Charles Chaplin.

Through her father’s connections as a founding president of the Society of the People of Letters, she met a variety of members of the Parisian cultural elite, and from a young age was exposed to the new ideas surrounding art and literature at the time.

Gonzales later 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. Gonzales posed for Manet in 1869 for the painting Portrait of Mlle Gonzales, a work which has previously been discussed more than Gonzales’ oeuvre at her own 1885 retrospective and at Galerie Daber’s exhibition for her work in 1950.

While studying under Manet, Gonzales 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.