Manet Never Took Students. Then He Met Eva Gonzalès.

Édouard Manet — the most argued-about painter in Paris, the man whose Olympia had scandalized the Salon — did not run a teaching studio. He had assistants, admirers, followers, imitators. What he never had was a pupil.

Then, in February 1869, the painter Alfred Stevens introduced him to a 21-year-old named Eva Gonzalès, and Manet broke his own rule. She became his student — and remained the only formal one he ever took.

The novelist's daughter

Gonzalès had advantages most women pursuing painting in the 1860s could only imagine. Her father, Emmanuel Gonzalès, was a celebrated novelist, and she grew up inside literary and artistic Paris, meeting the people other aspiring painters could only read about. At seventeen she began lessons with Charles Chaplin, a society portraitist who ran one of the few studios open to women — the École des Beaux-Arts would not admit them at all.

But Chaplin taught polish. Manet taught conviction. When Gonzalès moved to his studio, she stepped from the safest kind of art instruction to the most controversial painter in France.

Portrait of a pupil — or of a model?

Manet celebrated his new student the way he knew best: he painted her.

It took him sitting after sitting through the winter of 1869–70 — accounts describe him scraping down and repainting, never quite satisfied. The result, shown at the Salon of 1870, is gorgeous and strange: Gonzalès in a white evening dress no working painter would ever wear at the easel, touching a still life she could not plausibly be painting. Critics at the time read her as a decorative model first and an artist second, and some art historians since have made the same complaint — that Manet painted his only pupil as an ornament rather than a colleague.

There is a sharper edge to the story. Berthe Morisot, Manet's close friend and future sister-in-law, sat watching this new favorite absorb his attention, and her letters from those months bristle at the comparison — Manet, she wrote, kept holding Gonzalès up as the example. Whether that was rivalry between two gifted women or Morisot's frustration at Manet himself is something readers of those letters still argue about.

Her own name, her own Salon

What Gonzalès did next separates her from the model the critics saw. She began exhibiting at the official Salon in 1870 — under her own name, as a painter.

Like her teacher, she never once showed with the Impressionists, even as her circle overlapped theirs almost completely. The Salon was where reputations were made, and she wanted hers made properly.

Her subjects were the modern life around her — mothers and children, women reading, women dressing, her sister Jeanne again and again. The intimacy is the point: these are scenes a male painter of the era could rarely enter.

The opera box

Her most famous painting nearly didn't get seen at all. A Box at the Théâtre des Italiens — a woman in evening dress leaning into the light of an opera box, a bouquet on the ledge — went to the Salon jury of 1874 and, as the story is usually told, came back refused, with whispers that a picture so vigorous could not really be a woman's work.

She reworked it and tried again. In 1879 the jury accepted it, and this time the reception was rapturous. It's the painting at the top of this page — and it now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

Look at the bouquet on the ledge of the box. The Musée d'Orsay's own catalog note points out what Paris would have seen instantly: it quotes the flowers in Manet's Olympia — the scandal-painting of the decade, repaid as an homage by his student. The pupil was talking back to the teacher, in public, in his own language.

Six days

The ending comes cruelly fast. In 1879 Gonzalès married the engraver Henri Guérard. In April 1883 she gave birth to a son, Jean Raymond. Days later came the news that Manet — long ill — had died. On 6 May 1883, at just 36, Eva Gonzalès died of an embolism. Teacher and pupil were gone within a single week.

Her family mounted a retrospective of 88 works in 1885. Then, for the better part of a century, her paintings stayed mostly in family hands and out of public view — while the portrait Manet made of her hung in the National Gallery, seen by millions who never learned she was a painter at all.

Look again

That imbalance is finally correcting — the Petit Palais in Paris gave her a major retrospective, and her paintings now hang from the Musée d'Orsay to Dallas to the Art Institute of Chicago, where Girl with Cherries is on view right now.

Start with her artist page — all of her works on DiscoverArt, side by side with the portrait her teacher painted of her. Decide for yourself which one history should have looked at first.