Eva Gonzales

Portrait of Eva Gonzales, 1869-70, Edouard Manet

Eva Gonzales Self-portrait, 1860s

The most valuable aspect in studying history has little to do with memorizing dates and names. Those are only peripheral means to an end. No, the important thing about history is the way in which it provides a context for the present. Whatever perspective might be used--military, political, social, artistic, economic, religious--history allows us to frame our world today in a manner through which value judgments regarding current events can be made more accurately. Nowhere is this more the case than when we look at social customs at various mile markers in history--fifty, one-hundred, one-hundred-fifty years ago. A hundred-fifty years ago would be 1864. The U.S. Civil War was still raging. In Paris, ladies' dresses were as wide as they were tall. I've always wondered how women managed them in using an outside toilet (history doesn't tell us that). Speaking of ladies, they were worshipped and admired for their beauty, charm, and child-raising talents. They were placed high on a social pedestal (and then told to stay there). A lady who cared anything about her reputation did not go out without a gentleman escort. She was obliged to wear a torturous corset (below) to maintain an hour-glass figure (whether she had one or not). Even relations between a husband and wife were surprisingly formal. And never, under any circumstances, was a woman to compete professionally with her male peers (if, indeed, she had any).

 

A Loge in the Théâtre des Italiens, 1874, Eva Gonzales

Study at a Window, Eva Gonzales,
not portraits, just studies.

Eva Gonzales was a lady artist, a French Impressionist of Spanish descent who, indeed, had several male peers. She was born in 1849. At the age of sixteen, as upper-class young ladies were expected to do, she began developing her innate talents. In this case, music and painting. She studied first under the French society portrait artist, Charles Chaplin (not Charlie Chaplin, he hadn't even been born yet). Then, shortly after she turned twenty, Eva Gonzales became the only formal student of the French painting icon, Edouard Manet, who promptly used her as a model for a portrait exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1869. (Several of Manet's Impressionist friends also painted her.) She appears quite attractive, and though she had developed no small amount of talent, one still might reasonably ponder whether it was her feminine charms or her painting skills which won her a place in Manet's studio.

The Awakening, 1877-78, Eva Gonzales.
Manet would have insisted the model be nude. (The model was Eva's sister.)

Woman with a Bun, Eva Gonzales--
the subject is hair, not nudity.

In many ways, Gonzales and Manet were much alike. They were of the same social class. And, though they both painted Impressionistically (at times), neither stooped to displaying with the "disreputable" Impressionist as did Morisot and Cassatt, both of whom she undoubtedly knew and considered friends. Like her female counterparts, Gonzales' choice of subject matter was limited almost exclusively to women and children. It is there where any similarities to her painting instructor ended. You won't find any Olympias or naked ladies picnicking in the grass with fully dress gentlemen among her work. Her work is quite feminine and highly refined in every respect except perhaps her Impressionist style. She used her family and female friends as models, posed (or caught) in their daily lives of social restraint and refinement.

Reading in the Forest, Eva Gonzales. Where's the impressionist color?

La Toilette, 1879, Eva Gonzales

Eva Gonzales, like any good Impressionist, sometimes ventured outside, though there are precious few landscapes to her credit and most of her paintings of nature involve female figures enjoying it. Frankly, she wasn't very good at painting nature--Monet had nothing to worry about. Besides a few landscapes, I found one painting said to be of The Blue Mosque (below). I'm guessing it was done by copying another painting, or from a photo, in that it is so inaccurate as to have cause me to go in search of which Blue Mosque she might have painted (there were about ten of them in her time). It appears to be based upon the one in Istanbul, though there's no record of her ever having visited that part of the world. Islamic architecture was not her forte.


The Blue Mosque, Eva Gonzales (apparently the one in Istanbul).

The Window, Eva Gonzales.

That's not to in any way unduly limit Eva's skills as a painter. As her lovely young ladies depicted in The Window (left) would attest, she was the equal of any portrait painter in Paris at the time. Instead, as I've indicated above, her painting limitations came largely as she politely and strictly observed the social limitations imposed upon upper-class ladies of her day; and as the result of one other limiting factor. In 1879, Eva married a graphic artist named Henri Guérard. On May 6th, 1883, She died giving birth to their first child. She was thirty-four. Her total number of paintings number less than a hundred. History tells us death has a way of limiting an artist's output. Eva's mentor, Edouard Manet, had died just six days before.

The Clarion, 1869-70, Eva Gonzales--one of her few male portraits.