Eva Gonzalès (April 19, 1849 – May 6, 1883) was a French Impressionist painter. Eva Gonzalès, daughter of a Spanish (naturalized French) writer and a Belgian musician, grew up in a house that was a meeting place critics and writers including Theodore de Banville and Phillippe Jourde, director of the newspaper Siècle. After lessons with Charles Chaplin, a society portraitist who ran a studio for women and also taught Mary Cassatt, she became Manet's only formal pupil in 1869, receiving advice and instruction from him. She also modelled for him, and his Portrait of Eva Gonzalès, shown at the Salon in 1870 and presently in the National Gallery in London, presents her in front of an easel, working on a painting. Rejecting invitations to show with the Impressionists, she preferred instead to show at the Salons, exhibiting there in 1870 and 1879, where many critics preferred her more genteel pieces, but her work was also defended by many more realist critics (i.e., those supportive of the Impressionists) including Zacharie Astruc (the subject of an etched portrait by Whistler), Philippe Burty, and Emile Zola. Gonzalès mature work, both oil paintings and finished drawings, concentrated on subjects from life, including portraits and still-lifes. Her work was exhibited at the offices of the art review L'Art in 1882 and in 1883 at the Galerie Georges Petit. Her career was cut short when she died in childbirth at the age of thirty-four, exactly six days after the death of her teacher, Manet.
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