Eva Gonzalès 
A Free-Spirited Artiste

The Petit Palais devotes its first major retrospective to Eva Gonzalès (1847-1883), the only pupil Édouard Manet ever accepted into his studio.

Bringing Eva Gonzalès out from the shadow of the “women Impressionists”

A Parisian painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, Eva Gonzalès had never before been honoured with a retrospective. She is often known only at a distance, through the names of Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt, alongside whom she is routinely filed under “women Impressionists.” This exhibition takes the opposite approach to that convenient reading.

Born in Paris into a family of the intellectual upper bourgeoisie – her father was the novelist Emmanuel Gonzalès – she grew up surrounded by writers and artists.

Eva Gonzalès, an Artist of Confirmed Talent

Bringing together nearly 100 works, paintings, pastels and prints, the exhibition restores the three figures who mattered most in her career: Jeanne Gonzalès, her sister and favourite model, Henri Guérard, engraver and husband, and of course Édouard Manet. Works by Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond appear as counterpoints, not to blend Gonzalès into a collective, but to better illuminate what each of them built in a century ill-disposed to let women paint freely.

A master of luminous whites and intimate scenes, she developed a keen eye for her models’ moments of concentration and a virtuoso rendering of fabric, well beyond Manet’s influence. Eva Gonzalès died of an embolism in 1883, shortly after giving birth to a son, at just 36 years old.