Eva Gonzalès, Manet’s Only Student, Finally Gets Her Retrospective
In 1883, Eva Gonzalès died in Paris at 36, a few days after giving birth to her son. Her teacher, Édouard Manet, had died the week before. She had shown at the Salon since 1870, the French state had bought her work, and the press wrote about her often. Two years after her death, a retrospective was held in Paris. Then she slowly slipped out of the story.
More than 140 years later, Paris is giving her another one. “Eva Gonzalès: The Journey of a Free-Spirited Artist” is on view at the Petit Palais in Paris through January 24, 2027, with close to 100 paintings, pastels, and prints. In February, it travels to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as “Eva Gonzalès: A New Perspective.”
Manet’s Only Student
Gonzalès grew up surrounded by artists and writers. Her father, Emmanuel Gonzalès, was a well-known journalist and writer, and her mother, the musician Céline Ragut, kept a salon that drew literary Paris. As a teenager, she studied in the studio of the society painter Charles Joshua Chaplin, no relation to the film star.
In 1869 she met Manet, and she became the only student he ever formally took on. Berthe Morisot, who was also close to Manet, was not thrilled. That summer she wrote to her sister that Manet kept holding up “that eternal Mademoiselle Gonzalès” as an example. Gonzalès also sat for him. His large portrait of her at the easel, painted in a white dress far too nice to paint in, was shown at the Salon of 1870 and now belongs to the National Gallery in London. For a long time, that picture was how most people knew her name. She left no letters or diaries about her own life.
She never joined the Impressionists, though she is often grouped with Mary Cassatt and Morisot. She chose the official Salon instead and showed there regularly from 1870 until her death. Reviewing her first Salon, the critic Zacharie Astruc wrote that if she kept going, people would call her “Monsieur Eva.”
“A Box at the Théâtre des Italiens”
“A Box at the Théâtre des Italiens” is one of her most ambitious paintings. The models were her sister Jeanne and Henri Guérard, the engraver she would later marry. She signed her name in the lower left, on the ledge of the box.
The Salon jury turned the painting down in 1878. She submitted it again the next year, and this time it was accepted. In 1927, her son, Jean Guérard, gave it to the French state, and today it belongs to the Musée d’Orsay.
Jeanne
Jeanne Gonzalès was her sister’s favorite model, and also her student and confidante. She turns up again and again in the paintings, many of them quiet scenes of bedrooms and sitting rooms, like “Awakening” at the top of this page.
Eva married Henri Guérard in 1879. A few years after Eva’s death, Jeanne married Henri too, and the two of them raised Eva’s son.
Pastels by the Sea
In her later years, Gonzalès worked more and more in pastel, and the Van Gogh Museum says that is where her own style came through most clearly.
“By the Sea (Honfleur)” sold at Christie’s in New York in 2022 for $2.7 million with fees, still a record for her work at auction.
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, a curator at the Van Gogh Museum, and a team of researchers spent years tracking down the paintings, letters, and photographs for the show. “It was wonderful to recover her personal story and artistic development from collections all over the world,” she said in the museum’s announcement, “slowly but surely progressing from a footnote to the full picture.”
Seeing the Show
The Paris show follows her life in order, from her early work in Chaplin’s studio to the pastels of her last years, with works by Morisot, Cassatt, and Marie Bracquemond alongside. It was organized with the Van Gogh Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, and curated by Annick Lemoine, Stéphanie Cantarutti, and Roos Rosa de Carvalho.
If you’re in Paris before January 24, “Eva Gonzalès: The Journey of a Free-Spirited Artist” is at the Petit Palais. In Amsterdam, “Eva Gonzalès: A New Perspective” is at the Van Gogh Museum from February 12 to June 20, 2027.
