Eva Gonzalès: A Free-Spirited Artist

Eva Gonzalès, Le Réveil, 1877, Kunsthalle Bremen – Der Kunstverein in Bremen, Photo : Lars Lohrisch, Public Domain Mark 1.0

This groundbreaking monographic exhibition - organised jointly with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam - is dedicated to the painter Eva Gonzalès (1847–1883). Although a contemporary of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot —with whom she is often grouped— Eva Gonzalès has never before been the subject of a major retrospective, either in France or internationally. But who was this female artist? How can we move beyond the romanticized narrative that has surrounded her life and work from the very beginning? Was she merely a pupil of Édouard Manet—one of the era’s most controversial avant-garde figures? The exhibition highlights a body of work characterized by subtlety and a fluid, luminous brushstroke. Gonzalès drew her subjects from her circle of family and friends, capturing them in their everyday bourgeois lives. Bringing together nearly 100 works—paintings, pastels, and prints—in a chronological layout, this exhibition is the first to match the scope of the artist’s posthumous retrospective held in 1885, two years after her death.