Eva Gonzales - French Impressionist - Famous Artist Friday

French Impressionist

Eva Gonzales

Is our Famous Artist Friday subject.

Self Portrait

Born April 19, 1849 in Paris, France, of Spanish descent, Eva, along with all the women painters of her time period was refused entrance into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, even though her well to do family could have paid for her tuition.  

She trained for a while under society painter Charles Joshua Chaplin, and in 1868 was accepted as the only student ever of avant-garde painter, Edouard Manet.

Manet was taken with Gonzales art, but he promptly used her as a model in many of his paintings.  

This is one of the paintings Manet did of Gonzales, but the whereabouts of the painting she is painting are unknown.

It has been speculated that Manet was trying to make a social statement on the difficulty for women painters at the time because of the expensive dress and its totally inappropriateness for painting.

I really liked this because it gives us a very accurate visual of what she looked like in addition to her self portrait.

Women at this time period were extremely restricted in their activities.  They could not go out in public unescorted, they were to engage only in feminine activities such as caring for a home and children, and were never ever supposed to compete with men in a career.

Boy aren't we glad those days are over.  But Gonzales, even with these restrictions, was the equal to any portrait painter in Paris at the time.  Her work is very refined and consists mostly of women, children and domestic scenes.  She did paint some landscapes but they were not her main focus.  Her talent was definitely in portraiture.

A Lady

Her palette is soft and lovely and it is what drew me to her work as I was searching for a subject for this post.

The Loge

This piece brought considerable stir because the lady in the box at the theatre was so engaged with the performance and the gentleman was completely uninvolved.  Women were to be cherished and almost worshipped at this time and for him to be looking elsewhere was unconventional, to say the least.

Alcove

I love the filminess of this.  The linens, the night dress and the curtain.  

A Vase of Violets

...may well be one of Gonzales earliest works.  She was approximately 16 when she painted this and I love the whole treatment here.  The fan behind the vase and the vagueness of the flowers on the left hand side, but that one bright violet tells you everything yo need to know about the flowers.

Spanish Woman

...may have been the last painting of Gonzales life.

Gonzales painted less than 100 paintings in her short life.  In 1879 Gonzales married graphic artist, Henri Guerard.  In 1883 she died in child birth of their first child.  She was 34.

I hope you have enjoyed this post on Eva Gonzales.  

Her art work is in the public domain so I was able to bring a lot of her work to you.  I read an article about copyright of famous though deceased painters.  It said that even though you give credit as to the source you are still not to copy photos from one website to another.  However, her work has no copyright and the website I went to allowed it.

Sources for this article came from

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-gonzales-eva.htm

http://art-now-and-then.blogspot.com/2014/05/eva-gonzales.html

and you can see more of her art at 

http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/list.php?m=a&s=du&aid=376

If you enjoyed this article, please leave me a comment below.

If you enjoyed this post you might also enjoy

Edward Hopper - click HERE 

Marc Chagall - click HERE

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