A retrospective for Eva Gonzalès, who is today best known as Édouard Manet’s only formal pupil, has been long overdue. That correction was planned for 2020, when the Château-Musée de Dieppe was to organize a show as part of the Normandie Impressionniste festival, but it was put on hold by the pandemic until the Petit Palais took up the mantle, where “Eva Gonzalès (1847–1883): A Free-Spirited Artist’s Journey” is on view until January.
The six-year delay turned out to be fortuitous, according to cocurator Stéphanie Cantarutti. Now, Manet’s Portrait of Eva Gonzalès (1870) from the National Gallery and Gonzalès’s Une loge aux Italiens (ca. 1874) from the Musée d’Orsay, can be included, as can Gonzalès’s Le Moineau (ca. 1865-70), which the curatorial team managed to track down after decades of its whereabouts being unknown. One of some 70 works by her now on view, that delicate portrait of a young girl with a sparrow shows her mastery in pastel. “In the end, time worked in our favor,” Cantarutti told ARTnews.
The exhibition brings further discoveries, including a revision of the artist’s birth year. “What tipped us off was the way the date was written on the birth certificate,” Cantarutti said. “After taking a closer look at the document, we realized that she had been born in 1847, not 1849.” In-depth research also led to the redating and renaming of several paintings: La Fenêtre (1869–70), for example, was renamed Le Catéchisme, while La Psyché, now dated to 1868–69, had previously been dated to 1869–70.
For more than a century, since critic Camille Laurent Mauclair associated Gonzalès with Impressionism in 1904, the artist’s work has regularly been assessed and reassessed through this lens. A 1993 exhibition at Paris’s Musée Marmottan Monet, which presented her alongside Impressionism’s two most famous women artists, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, was instrumental in reinforcing this association. The Petit Palais exhibition, however, takes a different approach.
“I am personally opposed to this affiliation,” Cantarutti said. “I fought to ensure that the term ‘Impressionism’ would not appear in any communication materials. The exhibition in no way presents her as an Impressionist.”
There is art historical truth to that statement, as Gonzalès never participated in any of the Impressionist exhibitions. “Her strategy was, like Manet’s, to establish herself at the Salon,” conservator Marianne Mathieu said, noting that Berthe Morisot, against Manet’s advice, turned her back on the Salon and joined the cooperative society whose members would soon become known as the Impressionists.
Gonzalès and Morisot had much in common: They came from cultivated bourgeois families, were criticized for their fierce independence, used their sisters as models, continued to sign their maiden names after marriage, and were close friends with Manet. Morisot, however, further resisted Manet’s tutelage all the more after he substantially retouched one of her paintings in 1870, whereas Gonzalès would ultimately embrace his guidance. “Morisot sought to emancipate herself from the very idea of artistic affiliation, even if that meant becoming part of an emerging avant-garde,” added Mathieu. “Gonzalès, by contrast, boldly claimed her allegiance to Manet, who was a controversial figure at the time.”
The Gonzalès retrospective also raises the question of why this allegiance remained largely concealed for part of her early career. Gonzalès left the studio of Charles Chaplin, her first teacher who did not think a single woman should have her own studio, in 1868 and became Manet’s pupil the following year, after the two met at the salon of painter Alfred Stevens. Gonzalès’s pedagogical roots were further muddied when she submitted to the 1870 Salon. She registered as Chaplin’s pupil, but Enfant de troupe (1869–70), one of two paintings selected, clearly drew on Manet’s Le Fifre (1866). Depicting a young boy in military uniform holding a bugle against a dark, neutral background, Enfant de troupe was acquired by the French State, the only work of hers to enter a public collection during her lifetime, and the acquisition likely owed much to the connections of her father, prominent writer Emmanuel Gonzalès.
Further complicating the situation, Manet exhibited at the 1870 Salon his 6.25-foot-tall Portrait d’Eva Gonzalès. The novelist and journalist Armand Lapointe, a family friend, called the portrait a failure and reproached Gonzalès for having agreed to sit for Manet. Ironically, in 1874, the first year she came registered as Manet’s pupil at the Salon, her submission, Une loge aux Italiens, of a man and woman seated in a theater box, was rejected by the jury.
It is difficult to assess Gonzalès’s style, as she died too young—at 36, with the revised birth year—to reveal the full extent of her abilities. She confined herself to the subjects traditionally deemed appropriate for women artists at the time: portraits of family and friends, scenes of domestic life and leisure, and still lifes. Such subjects helped her avoid controversy and establish a reputation. According to critic Jean-Marie Tasset, “Behind her intimate scenes and landscapes lies a fierce energy, a blazing fire that reveals itself as soon as Eva sets her brush to canvas. All the dark magic of the blue note.” Under Manet’s aegis, her style grew more spontaneous. How brightly and freely her flame might have burned had she lived longer remains an open question.
At the Petit Palais, visitors follow a broadly chronological path through Gonzalès’s career, with thematic digressions exploring her relationship with her husband, Henri Guérard, and their artistic partnership, including time spent together in Normandy. A renowned beauty with a slender figure and an elegant wardrobe evocative of her social status, Gonzalès had rejected eligible suitors before falling in love with Guérard, a talented engraver who collaborated with Manet, Paul Gachet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cezanne, among others. The couple married in 1879 and remained together until Gonzalès’s death in 1883. Guérard later remarried his sister-in-law Jeanne, which Gonzalès seems to have predicted in her rejected-Salon painting, Une loge aux Italiens: the man and woman are, in fact, Guérard and Jeanne. “There is material for a great movie scenario, for sure,” Cantarutti said. “We, however, chose to stick to the facts.”
The final section unfolds in two parts. One looks beyond Gonzalès’s death, bringing together pastels of Jeanne posing in Eva’s wedding dress (perhaps another premonition on Gonzalès’s part), photographs of Gonzalès’s 1885 posthumous retrospective, and a Norbert Goeneutte portrait of Eva’s son, Jean-Raimond.
The other half focuses on the artist’s final works, including Miss et Bébé (1877–78) featuring a nanny watching over a little girl. “We can see the evolution from the porcelain-like finish of compositions in the style of Chaplin toward a more energetic touch,” Cantarutti said. “In unfixed pastel-on-canvas works held in the United States, her use of increasingly bold colors is striking, along with a greater freedom in her brushwork.” In Pommes d’Api, which is owned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art and was too fragile to bring to Paris, the brightness of Gonzalès’s reds and yellows convey the apples’ acidity.
What accounts Gonzalès’s near absence from most art historical tellings of late 19th-century French art? The exhibition shows that she enjoyed considerable success during her lifetime, and Jean-Raimond Guérard tried to keep the contributions of his mother in the conversation as much as he could. But unlike Julie Manet, Berthe Morisot’s daughter, he alone was working to keep alive Gonzalès’s legacy, according to Cantarutti. Julie Manet was surrounded by figures like Stéphane Mallarmé, Claude Monet, and Edgar Degas, who helped her elevate Morisot’s status as a preeminent Impressionist, as did her husband, Ernest Rouart, who was at the same time fighting to secure recognition for his father’s collection and work.
Cantarutti offered a second reason: “She is not that heavily represented in French national museums.” The Musée d’Orsay has La Matinée rose (The Pink Morning), a 1874 pastel acquired by the French state in 1885. More than 135 years would pass before the Petit Palais purchased the oil painting La Servante or À la barrière (ca. 1865-70) in 2021. (“Most of her works are now in private collections, scattered across France and abroad,” Cantarutti noted.)
Gonzalès has often been described in relation to others—as someone’s daughter or someone’s pupil—and much has been made of the connections that linked her to this artistic and literary milieu. “What struck me, however, was that she was interesting in her own right,” said Cantarutti, who sees the exhibition as a first step toward more recognition and research. “With more than a hundred works, including roughly two-thirds by her, we have never been so close to recreating the scale of the 1885 retrospective. It is a chance for the public to discover what a remarkable artist she was—and I think people will be pleasantly surprised.”