Eva Gonzalès

Biography of Eva Gonzalès ( 1849-1883 )

Born in a Monaco bourgeois family of Spanish origin, Eva Gonzalès lives in Paris a happy childhood. Eva Gonzalès grows in artists' atmosphere, surrounded with her father, the novelist Emmanuel Gonzalès and with her mother Belgian musician.


At first pupil of Charles Chaplin, Eva Gonzalès pursues her learning in Gustave Brinon's course. In 1869, the painter Eva Gonzalès joins Édouard Manet's studio, who had been presented to her by Alfred Steven, and meets Berthe Morisot there who will envy her her friendship with the master. Eva Gonzalès is frequently of use as model to the group of artists who form the impressionistic school and receives the eulogies of Émile Zola and Castagnary. Removed in Dieppe during the French-German war of 1870 she paints rather dark paintings there.

In 1879, Eva Gonzalès marries the painter and the engraver Henri Guérard. The painter Norbert Gœneutte, a great friend of the couple, will paint several portraits of her, her husband and her son. Eva sometimes took Henri, and very often her younger sister, Jeanne Constance, as subject for some of her paintings, as well as her mother. Although the subjects of her paintings are the same that those chosen by the impressionists, the style is different from it, closer to "Spanish" paintings of the debuts of Manet.

Eva Gonzalès participates in the Salon of the French Artists from 1870 till 1879, and exposes to the Gallery Georges Petit in 1882 and 1883. However, Eva Gonzalès refuses to participate in the Impressionistic Salon, but rest very close to this artistic movement and to her friends. The couple goes to farm Saint-Siméon to Honfleur where it finds the painters Félix Bracquemond, Félix Buhot, Paul Cézanne, Adolphe-Félix Cals, Jules Chéret, Ernest Cabaner and Norbert Gœneutte.

Only six days after the death of her teacher and great friend Édouard Manet, Eva Gonzalès dies brutally in thirty four years, taken by an embolism, while she prepared a tribute to him.