Gonzalès’s sister Jeanne, who was also an artist, probably posed for this scene. Women in the Impressionist circle frequently portrayed such glimpses of domestic life. In this work, an ensemble of pictorial elements stimulates the senses, including the silky, rustling gown and fragrant violets. The pearly gray and pink palette and the brisk handling of the pigments are similar to pastels made in the late 1870s by Gonzalès’s teacher, Edouard Manet.
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Title:The Bouquet of Violets
Artist:Eva Gonzalès (French, Paris 1847–1883 Paris)
Date:ca. 1877–78
Medium:Pastel on wove paper
Dimensions:9 7/8 x 7 1/2 in. (25.1 x 19.1 cm)
Classification:Drawings
Credit Line:Bequest of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2019
Accession Number:2019.141.12
Today Éva Gonzalès is remembered principally as a pupil of Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and as one of the quartet of serious and talented women—including Marie Bracquemond (1840–1916), Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895)—who were part of the Impressionist circle. Daughter of a Spanish writer and a Belgian musician, Gonzalès was born into the Parisian art world. She began taking lessons from society portraitist Charles Chaplin (1825–1891) at the age of sixteen and continued as his student until she was twenty-one. It was in 1869, in the studio of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, that Gonzalès met Manet, whom she seems to have impressed immediately with her robust beauty, becoming first his model and later his pupil.
Like other women artists of the period with whom she is most closely associated, Gonzalès usually pictured the kinds of quiet domestic scenes with which she was intimately acquainted. The pastels she produced in the late 1870s are rather like Manet’s of the same period, lighter and more delicate, seemingly reviving the confectionery of eighteenth-century masters François Boucher and Jean Honoré Fragonard. In 1879 Gonzalès married the engraver Henri Guérard (1846–1897). She died from complications in childbirth four years later, only six days after the death of Manet, her friend and teacher.
Manet’s influence pervades this pastel, although it is, overall, a softer, sweeter picture than anyone might expect from the master. The pearly gray and pink palette, the brisk handling of the pigments, and an ensemble of pictorial elements that awaken our senses, including the silky, rustling gown and the fragrant violets, all bring to mind Manet’s singular powers. It was in the 1870s that he, too, produced tender portraits of women and flowers—perhaps finding himself not altogether immune to the tastes of his pupils Gonzalès and Berthe Morisot.
Gonzalès often employed her sister Jeanne (also a talented artist) as a model for her pictures of women engaged in polite daily life, and most likely it is she who is portrayed arranging a bunch of violets to be placed in a small blue porcelain vase.
Associated with friendship, admiration, and constancy, the violet has a long history in art, establishing itself in the West as a praiseworthy subject during the early Renaissance in tapestries and in a well-known watercolor by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). In the nineteenth century the flower gained popularity, as strains of the Parma violet were adapted for growth in more northern climes and a perfume was developed by Italian monks for Napoleon’s second wife, Maria Luigia, duchess of Parma. In 1872, Manet had depicted Berthe Morisot wearing a corsage of violets (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and then painted a nosegay for her in a still life (private collection, Paris).
[2014; adapted from Ives 2005]
Inscription: Signed (upper right): Eva Gonzalès
Raymond Deslandes (in 1885); Henri Guérard, widower of the artist, Paris (until d. 1897; his posthumous inv., May 25, 1897, as "par Eva Gonzalès, un pastel, jeune fille tenant un bouquet"); Jeanne Guérard-Gonzalès, sister of the artist and second wife of Henri Guérard, Paris (from 1897); Jean-Raymond Guérard, son of the artist, Paris (in 1924); his wife, Mme Jean-Raymond Guérard (in 1952); [David Carritt Limited, London]; [Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York]; [Noortman & Brod, London, by 1982–83; sold to Wrightsman]; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York (1983–his d. 1986); Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York (1986–d. 2019; cat., 2005, no. 118)
Paris. Salons de la "Vie Moderne". "Peintures et pastels de Eva Gonzalès," January 15–31, 1885, no. 38 (as "Le Bouquet de Violettes," lent by Raymond Deslandes).
Paris. Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées. "Salon d'automne," October 1–22, 1907, no. 14 (in the "Exposition Eva Gonzalès").
London. Noortman & Brod. "Seventh Annual Exhibition of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century French Watercolours and Drawings," November 17–December 17, 1982, no. 13.
Maastricht. Noortman & Brod. "Impressionists: An Exhibition of French Impressionist Paintings," April 23–May 28, 1983, no. 11.
London. Noortman & Brod. "Impressionists: An Exhibition of French Impressionist Paintings," June 14–July 29, 1983, no. 11.
THIS WORK MAY NOT BE LENT, BY TERMS OF ITS ACQUISITION BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.
Roger Marx. "L’exposition Éva Gonzalès." Journal des arts (January 20, 1885), p. 2, calls it a "production d'élite" and writes that it evokes the art of the eighteenth century.
Edmond Jacques. "Beaux-Arts." L’intransigeant (January 21, 1885), p. 3.
Robert Hénard. "Les expositions." La Renaissance Politique, Littéraire et Artistique 2 (April 4, 1914), p. 25.
François Monod. "L’Impressionnisme féminin, deux élèves de Manet: Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), Éva Gonzalès (1849–1883)." Art et Décoration supplément (May 1914), p. 3.
Paule Bayle. "Éva Gonzalès." La renaissance 15 (June 1932), ill. p. 113.
Claude Roger-Marx. "Eva Gonzales." Arts: Beaux-Arts, Littérature, Spectacles (July 14, 1950), p. 8.
Claude Roger-Marx. Eva Gonzalès. Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1950, unpaginated, ill.
Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu and Jacques de Mons. Eva Gonzalès, 1849–1883: Étude critique et catalogue raisonné. Paris, 1990, pp. 204–5, 274–75, no. 92, ill. (color and black and white).
Carol Jane Grant. "Eva Gonzalès (1849–1883): An Examination of the Artist’s Style and Subject Matter." PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1994, pp. 298, 496, pl. CLXIX.
Colta Ives inThe Wrightsman Pictures. Ed. Everett Fahy. New York, 2005, pp. 412–13, no. 118, ill. (color).
Didier Rykner. "Le legs Wrightsman au Metropolitan (3): peintures et pastel français du XIXe." Tribune de l'art (August 26, 2019), fig. 4 (color) [https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-legs-wrightsman-au-metropolitan-3-peintures-et-pastel-francais-du-xixe].
This work may not be lent, by terms of its acquisition by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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