Edouard Manet
NG3259 
Eva Gonzalès

Sarah Herring, 2024

With technical contributions by Hayley Tomlinson, Catherine Higgitt and Marika Spring, 2024

Extracted from:
The National Gallery; with entries by Emma Capron, Dillian Gordon, Sarah Herring, Mary McMahon, Letizia Treves and Francesca Whitlum‐Cooper; with technical contributions by Paul Ackroyd, Rachel Billinge, Lynne Harrison, Catherine Higgitt, Helen Howard, Larry Keith, Marta Melchiorre, Britta New, David Peggie, Marika Spring and Hayley Tomlinson, Online Entries (London: The National Gallery, 2024).

1870

Oil on canvas, 191.1 × 133.4 cm (visible painted area)

Signed on rolled print in lower right corner: Manet 1870

Technical Notes

Support

The large, fine‐weave canvas broadly corresponds to a commercially supplied French standard size figure 120 of 195 × 130 cm; the current visible painted area measured up to the brown paper tape covering the edges is 191.1 × 133.4 cm but incorporates what seem to be folded‐out tacking edges at the sides explaining the additional width. At the top the original paint extends beneath this tape, so that the image height is actually approximately 193.3 cm (the stretcher is 193.8 cm in height), closer to the standard figure 120 size, but still indicating the possibility of some slight trimming at the top.

There are the following labels on the back:

• A Paul Cassirer label, Manet no. 5045.
• A Durand‐Ruel label, badly torn, but with the number 5104 visible, handwritten in ink.¹
• Michell and Kimbel, forwarding, storage, packing, 31 Place du Marché‐St‐Honoré, Paris, ‘Manet’ hand‐written.²

Materials and Technique³

The canvas was probably commercially primed. It has a single white ground layer consisting of lead white and a tiny amount of chalk (calcium carbonate) as an impurity or extender.⁴ Infrared reflectography did not reveal any evidence of preliminary carbon‐based drawing or sketch lines, but X‐ray fluorescence scanning suggests Manet used a brownish paint to sketch out the design onto the canvas. This paint, containing earth pigments, cobalt blue and vermilion, corresponds closely to one of the ‘sauce’ recipes favoured by Manet’s former master Thomas Couture (1815–1879).⁵ This is evident from the flurry of lines visible in the XRF elemental distribution maps, which indicate numerous changes in the positioning of the hands, arms and palette as Manet developed the design on the canvas rather than in preliminary drawings (fig. 1).

Although impossible to confirm in this case (the overlying paint layers are too thick), the evidence of unfinished paintings suggests that Manet would have proceeded to make some kind of ébauche (an underpainting in thin, muted colours) prior to application of the main paint layers.

Determining the pigments employed by Manet in the main paint layers is complicated by both his painting technique and his use of tube paints. He frequently made changes as he worked (see below), sometimes leading to complex layering of paint. He also employed a much greater range of pigments than those recommended by Couture (including black), in one known instance combining ten pigments for the creation of a single colour, far exceeding the maximum of three advised by his former master.⁶ It is evident from close examination of his brushstrokes that the paints have not always been fully mixed on the palette prior to application. The fact that Manet used tube paints adds another layer of complexity: tube paints at this period were often mixtures of more than one pigment to obtain a particular colour and commonly contained a variety of extenders.

Most of the paint samples taken were focused on understanding the status of the corners, which differ in character from the rest of the painting (see further below). For the main part of the painting, the pigments have been inferred mostly from the results of XRF scanning, supplemented by more limited detailed information from the few paint samples.⁷ Those that have been securely identified are similar to those reported in other works by the artist.⁸

Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzalès is dominated by blue tones. Samples from the grey‐blue background reveal it is composed of multiple paint layers containing mixtures of lead white, cobalt blue, ivory black and a yellow ochre.⁹ XRF scanning also suggests the use of cobalt blue (which contains some nickel) for the blue decoration in the sitter’s hair, the blue vase in the painting on the easel and the scarf draped over the easel, as well as in the blue shadow along the left‐hand side of the sitter’s chest and blue touches on her dress. Cobalt blue is also used for the sky‐blue of the carpet,¹⁰ except in the bottom corners where samples indicate that the main blue pigments are cerulean blue with some ultramarine.¹¹ Analysis of the binding medium in samples taken from both cobalt blue‐ and cerulean blue‐containing areas of the carpet confirms the use of walnut oil that had been heat‐bodied.¹²

The black pigment in the sash around the sitter’s waist seems to also be ivory black, with other pigments incorporated for subtle variations in colour, such as cobalt blue in the greyer strokes and possibly some earth pigments for the more brownish‐blacks. The same approach can be seen in the blacker parts of the sitter’s hair.¹³

The main green pigment is viridian, used for the foliage in the vase, the stem and leaves of the peony and the decoration on the carpet. There is some evidence for the localised use of a copper‐containing pigment, probably a copper‐arsenic green.¹⁴

The XRF element map for chromium suggests that in addition to the green pigment viridian, one or more yellow or orange‐coloured chromate pigments have been used. Based on other works by Manet, the use of chrome yellow or chrome orange (forms of lead chromate), zinc yellow (zinc chromate) or a yellow barium chromate might be expected. The XRF scanning reveals that barium is present in a number of areas, mainly in yellow, brown and green colours, but also a small amount in the flesh paint and in the pale blue of the carpet, but barium sulphate, a common extender in tube paints, is more likely to be present than yellow barium chromate since it was identified in some of the samples. In some of the yellowish or green areas of the carpet, the palette, parts of the picture frame and flower painting and the back of the chair in its initial position (see below), zinc was detected, which again could be from zinc yellow but could also indicate zinc white. A sample securely identified zinc white in the yellow paint probably applied by Manet in the bottom corners (partially covered by the cerulean blue‐containing layer), combined with Naples yellow and some yellow earth pigment.¹⁵ The dress is painted using lead white, which appears to be the main white pigment used throughout the painting.

A variety of earth pigments, including umber, has been used, both for some of the yellowish colours and the range of brown paints, and additionally in mixtures to create other colours.¹⁶ These brown paints sometimes include some vermilion, as in the sitter’s hair, the easel, the paintbrushes and the wooden base of the footstool. The flesh tones have been created from mixtures of lead white and vermilion, with vermilion and earth pigments employed to pick out the features. Vermilion has also been used in some of the pinkish tones in the footstool upholstery, carpet and the flowers in the vase and the pink parts of the pattern on the carpet, but the principal pigment in these areas is a somewhat faded red lake pigment containing tin, usually an indication of a particular type of cochineal lake or carmine.¹⁷

Conservation and Condition

The painting is generally in very good condition. There is an old tear in the area of the picture on the easel (visible in the X‐radiograph and XRF element maps). There is also a black splash mark in the area beneath the easel that is similarly thought to be early damage.¹⁸ The wrinkling and cracking in several areas relate to the artist’s technique, but all of them are stable. The painting was cleaned and restored by Norman Brommelle in 1955 with some minor work (surface cleaning, revarnishing and adjustment of retouchings) since then.

Already in Manet’s lifetime there were reports of apparent deterioration in the appearance of Olympia (1865; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 644), and Blanche recalls the ‘calming of the coloration’ that had occurred in four of Manet’s late works.¹⁹ In Eva Gonzalès it is clear that the red lake pigment in the footstool has faded (in a paint cross‐section the red paint layer is lighter in hue near the surface due to exposure to light) and other areas of the painting (for example, the flowers in the still‐life painting, Gonzalès’s flesh and the pink parts of the pattern on the carpet) may once have exhibited pinker tones. The scruffy, dark paint in the two lower corners – discussed below – must once have matched the adjacent original blue of the rug more closely, and the current appearance is most probably a result of the corner paint having subsequently darkened.

Process

Manet did not engage in the lengthy and complicated planning stages that were central to the academic approach to painting, a methodology which he came to view as formulaic, contrived and false. Rather, he sought to respond directly to what was in front of him. Manet equated spontaneity with sincerity, qualities that he prized highly and struggled constantly to achieve throughout his career. But this approach was high risk. Manet was frequently dissatisfied with his work and in the position of wishing to correct it.²⁰ For example, according to Antonin Proust, Manet discarded ‘7 or 8’ canvases before he succeeded in capturing him ‘in one go’ for his 1880 portrait (Toledo Museum of Art, inv. 1925.108).²¹ If discarding the canvas was not an option, he was faced with the decision either to cover the offending area with more paint, or alternatively to rub or scrape the paint off, removing the mistake entirely. In his quest for spontaneity, especially for portraiture, he invariably chose the latter option, preferring to start afresh rather than end up with thick, overworked layers. Claude Monet, who spent time working with Manet in 1874, describes how Manet ‘made things very difficult for himself … He always wanted his painting to look as if done at the first attempt; but often, in the evening, he scraped down with his palette knife everything he had painted during the day.’²²

The inevitable consequence of these regular scrapings is that Manet required his portrait subjects to consent to frequent and numerous sittings. Indeed, Manet described it as one of his greatest fears that his sitters might not oblige (and indeed, some wearied and gave up).²³ Of those that persevered, the most extreme example is Emile Bellot, who is recorded as enduring a total of 80 sittings for Le Bon Bock (1873; Philadelphia Museum of Art, inv. 1963‐116‐9).²⁴ In the case of Eva Gonzalès, Manet’s progress was documented in a series of letters written by Berthe Morisot to her sister, Edma Morisot.

On 13 August 1869 she wrote: Manet lectures me and holds up that eternal Mademoiselle Gonzalès as an example; she has poise, perseverance, she is able to carry an undertaking to a successful issue, whereas I am not capable of anything. In the meantime, he has begun her portrait over again for the twenty‐fifth time. She poses every day, and every night (in the evening) the head is washed out with soft soap. This will scarcely encourage anyone to pose for him!²⁵

And on 10 September she wrote: We spent Thursday evening at Manet’s … all his admiration is concentrated on Mademoiselle Gonzalès, but her portrait does not progress; he says that he is at the fortieth sitting and that the head is again effaced. He is the first to laugh about it.²⁶

Once the portrait was complete, Berthe Morisot wrote that it was the best thing Manet had ever painted but changed her mind upon seeing it at the Salon, calling it ‘washed out’ and concluding that ‘the head remains weak and is not pretty at all’.²⁷

The portrait, and Manet’s difficulties, must have had some renown or even reputation beyond the Morisot/Manet circle. In a letter from landscape painter Antoine Guillemet to Emile Zola of 28 August 1869 he writes, ‘the full‐length portrait must be curious to see’.²⁸

There are clear signs of scraping in the X‐radiograph (for example in the nose) (fig. 2), but evidence of an earlier version (or versions) of her face – which was rounder, with the curls on her forehead closer together – can also be seen and was not entirely scraped away. This suggests that at some point Manet must have resolved to work with what was there, even though it meant applying more paint on top. The paint in this area looks noticeably thick and overworked and Gonzalès’s face certainly does not look as if painted in one go. Finally, perhaps to counteract the heaviness of the paint layers and to create some sense of spontaneity, he seems to have applied a final, thin, sketchy layer over the whole of the face.

Although Manet clearly felt strongly about the need for the appearance of spontaneity in relation to faces (the part of his paintings he cared about most?), he seems to have been more relaxed about the issue in other areas of his compositions with numerous instances of revisions painted over existing forms. Olympia is a case in point: although the X‐radiograph shows much scraping around the head and feet, most of the considerable changes to the setting were painted on top of what was there before.²⁹ The X‐radiograph of Eva Gonzalès (fig. 3) and the XRF element maps reveal a number of changes, including revisions to Gonzalès’s skirts and the introduction of a footstool. It is also clear that the easel was originally in a more oblique position (less tilted towards the viewer), and the position and angle of the chair have been altered too. The paint in these areas and around Gonzalès’s arms (the position of which Manet altered several times) consequently looks very thick and shows extensive drying cracks. Interestingly, however, the more one considers the final appearance of the easel, painting and chair, particularly their perspective and position in space, the less sense they make (something which contemporary viewers were quick to notice and make fun of). Manet seems not to have been overly concerned – in his backgrounds at least – with the faithful copying of nature or the creation of intelligible pictorial space, often apparently deliberately moving towards an increasingly illogical arrangement. The most glaring example is the deliberate undermining of intelligible spatial relationships in A Bar at the Folies‐Bergère (1882; The Courtauld, London, inv. P.1934.SC.234). Formal concerns centred around pattern and balance seem to have been far more important: Manet, like many of his contemporaries, appears to have been strongly influenced by Japanese prints.³⁰ There is also evidence that Manet was always striving for simplification and clarity of design, suppressing fussy elements in his compositions.³¹ Presumably the sacrifice of the little pot of brushes – visible on the floor to the left of Gonzalès in the X‐radiograph, but later painted out – was made on these grounds (figs 4 and 5).

The aspect of Manet’s execution most frequently commented upon in his own time was his lack of surface finish, his works regularly accused of looking sketchy and of having been too hastily dashed off. The truth, as those close to Manet knew, was quite the reverse: each of his paintings cost him an enormous amount of time and labour. In the case of Eva Gonzalès this labour was more apparent than Manet would have liked, with large swathes of the painting looking overworked rather than sketchy or hastily executed. Nonetheless, in contrast to highly finished academic paintings where barely a brush mark can be seen, Manet’s handling must have appeared comparatively broad and rough, especially in the dress and the carpet.

Manet’s rejection of the academic approach also included the avoidance of artificial studio lighting, insisting instead on natural lighting conditions. In practical terms this meant that his paintings were often significantly lighter in tone than those of his academic counterparts, with greatly reduced areas of shadow and very little evidence of half‐tones. For the public in 1870, unaccustomed to seeing paintings in this way, the portrait of Eva Gonzalès appeared ‘brutal and loud’.³²

Framing

A print of the photograph of the painting by Anatole Godet from about 1872 was trimmed to a rectangle with rounded corners, presumably a representation of the original intended format.³³ In another photograph taken at the 1884 Manet retrospective at the Ecole des Beaux‐Arts, Paris, the painting retains the same presentation although this is now achieved with inserts set into a rectangular frame to create the rounded corners (fig. 6). A further photograph of 1895, showing a room in the apartment of Eva Gonzalès’s widower Henri Guérard, with his wife Jeanne Guérard (Eva Gonzalès’s sister), appears to show the painting in the same frame, but with the inserts removed and the corners exposed and evidently painted up as they are now (fig. 7). This same frame surrounds the painting in the 1903 Vienna Secession and the 1905 Grafton Galleries exhibitions.³⁴ It was swapped for the present, much more ornate one, presumably by Sir Hugh Lane, on the occasion of its purchase in 1906. The latter is the frame in which the painting appears in William Orpen’s Homage to Manet (fig. 8) (see below for discussion of the Orpen work).

From close examination of the painting it is possible to observe sweeping lines of paint beneath the surface roughly following the contours of the rounded corners (less prominent at top right), presumably Manet’s way of demarcating the limits of the composition and suggesting that this format was his original intention. The areas outside of the lines are brought to a much lower degree of finish than the main body of the painting, especially at the upper right. At the bottom right the rolled‐up print extends onto the bottom right corner, Manet probably painting it in its entirety to make it easier to get the overall form right, even if part of it was subsequently going to be covered up (fig. 9). In both of the bottom corners a roughly applied yellowish layer is evident beneath the blue of the carpet and also the rolled‐up print, the latter observation indicating that this yellow paint at least was applied by Manet.³⁵

While there is nothing that would definitively exclude the corners from having been completed by Manet (but then covered by the initial framing),³⁶ an unpublished manuscript by the French art critic Arsène Alexandre (1859–1937) suggests a more likely explanation. According to Alexandre, Guérard – then Eva Gonzalès’s widower – had ‘the strange fancy of returning to a rectangle this painting which had originally been painted by Manet for, and in, an oval frame. With his customary dexterity, he completed the four corners. It was exactly the continuation of tones, but when you look at it closely, the handling is not adequate, and the correction was perfectly superfluous, to put it mildly’.³⁷

Subject³⁸

The sitter of this portrait is the young artist Eva Gonzalès (1847–1883), whom Manet took as his first and only formal pupil in early 1869.³⁹ At this time he was at the centre of avant‐garde circles in Paris, and in his commitment to subjects taken from modern life a figurehead for the Impressionist generation. But he never exhibited with the Impressionists, preferring instead to show at the annual Salon, where such paintings as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 1668) and Olympia created scandals at the Salon des Refusés of 1863 and the Salon of 1865 respectively. After rejections at the Salon of 1866, including The Fifer (1866; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 1992), in 1867 he held his own exhibition in the grounds of the Exposition Universelle. So, as a potential teacher for a young artist, he was a somewhat notorious, possibly even risky, figure.

Eva Gonzalès was the daughter of Emmanuel Gonzalès (1815–1887), writer and dramatist of Spanish heritage (a self‐pronounced descendant of a Monacan family ennobled by Charles V), and Marie Céline Raguet (1823–1880), musician and singer. She and her younger sister Jeanne (1852–1924), also an artist, were born into a cultivated, bourgeois milieu with prominent writers and artists of the day attending their parents’ soireés.⁴⁰ As was usual in such families, her own initial education, including that in drawing and music, was supervised by her mother. Outside the home, opportunities for women to study art were restricted at this period. Excluded from studying at the Ecole des Beaux‐Arts until 1897, their options included making private arrangements, or studying at a handful of studios that accepted women, generally at twice the cost of their male counterparts.⁴¹ Encouraged by her godfather Philippe Jourde, director of the magazine Le Siècle, and writer Théodore de Banville, she entered one of the most famous, that of Charles Chaplin, where she studied from 3 January 1866 until at least late 1867.⁴² Chaplin was both a renowned portraitist of women and an established decorative artist whose work enshrined eighteenth‐century subject matter and style, particularly his portrayals of women in light pastel colours and delicate brushwork.⁴³ One of his most famous decorative schemes was the Salon des Fleurs in the Tuileries (now destroyed), featuring allegorical figures representing flowers.⁴⁴ He opened his women‐only studio in 1853–4, attracting pupils from all over Europe and America, including Mary Cassatt. He offered classes from the life at the early hour of 7 am, which Gonzalès undoubtedly attended.⁴⁵ She is said to have subsequently studied with Brion, presumably Gustave Brion (1824–1877).⁴⁶ Later still, in February 1869, Alfred Stevens introduced her to Manet, and he accepted her as his pupil.⁴⁷ Chaplin and Manet are not the opposites they might appear at first sight: while differing in his approach to colour and handling, Manet was as consummate a portrayer of women as Chaplin, indeed in the medium of pastel he explicitly aimed to equal, even surpass, the latter in this regard.⁴⁸ Like Chaplin, he also had a taste for the eighteenth century, the implications of which for this portrait will be discussed in further detail.⁴⁹

Gonzalès’s lessons with Manet were interrupted by the Franco‐Prussian War and Commune (1870–1). Gonzalès and her family moved temporarily to Dieppe, while Manet joined the National Guard in Paris. If it is not clear when they resumed sessions on her return to Paris, what is evident is that throughout the 1870s Manet made regular Sunday visits to her studio in her parents’ house at 11 place Bréda to give her advice. But by their untimely deaths just a few weeks apart in spring 1883 their relationship had developed from that of a teacher and pupil into an artistic dialogue on a more equal footing.⁵⁰ Gonzalès had become an established artist who regularly exhibited at the Salon, generally to great acclaim, but like Manet not always without a struggle. Her Theatre Box at the Italiens (fig. 10), the subject of which was considered too radical for a woman to tackle, was initially rejected from the Salon of 1874 before being accepted in 1879.⁵¹ Now considered her undoubted masterpiece, its innovative treatment (in particular her female figure leaning assertively across the balcony, a pair of men’s binoculars in her hand) consolidated Gonzalès’s position in avant‐garde circles.⁵² She was also a skilful practitioner of pastel, a technique she learnt from Chaplin, regularly showing pastels at the Salon, including her very first in 1870, and her choice of canvas over paper as a support possibly inspired Manet’s own practice.⁵³

Unlike the relentlessly brooding Morisot, whose struggles with her feelings particularly in relation to Gonzalès are conveyed in the letters quoted above, Gonzalès has not left correspondence or diaries detailing either her experiences or reactions. Thus, any record of Manet’s teaching methods (which were surely informal and to a large extent improvised) has not been passed down, apart from a description by the critic Philippe Burty of a lesson by Manet in which he laid out a still life of grapes, salmon and a knife on a white cloth, an arrangement reminiscent of his own still lifes of the 1860s, and instructed her to capture it quickly. Burty writes: when you look at the whole thing, you don’t try and count the scales on the salmon. Of course not. You see them as little silver pearls against grey and pink – isn’t that right? Look at the pink of this salmon, with the bone appearing white in the centre and then greys like shades of mother of pearl! And the grapes, now do you count each grape? Of course not. What strikes you is their clear amber colour, and the bloom which models the form by softening it. What you have to decide with the cloth is where the highlights come and then the planes which are not in direct light. Half‐tones are for the Magasin pittoresque engravers.⁵⁴ Such a still life Gonzalès may have painted at this time has not survived.⁵⁵ But a work that she did paint during this period, Portrait de femme, Etude, 1869–70, is inscribed ‘Study corrected by my master M. Edouard Manet’, indicating a teacher unafraid to revise his pupil’s work.⁵⁶

The portrait itself was started in the summer of 1869, and the dress decided upon in advance. In June or July of that year Manet wrote to Emmanuel Gonzalès: If Mlle Gonzalès and you are still of the same mind, I would be very happy to start the portrait on Sunday at whatever time suits you. It seems more convenient to do it at home at 49 rue de St Pétersbourg, where there is a small room that I can use as a studio. If you agree, I shall send someone on Sunday morning to pick up Mademoiselle Gonzalès’ dress.⁵⁷ Of white cotton, it is actually a bodice and skirt (commonly combined to imitate a dress), the former composed of a white corsage that finishes low on the back, overlaid with a transparent muslin formed into a square, low‐cut neck, trimmed with a ruffle of pleated fabric, and short puffed sleeves. The skirt is bordered with a fashionable flounce, the fullness of the skirt brought round to the front. At her waist is tied a black, possibly velvet, sash with fringed ends. White muslin dresses, with contrasting belts and transparent sleeves, were very fashionable in the 1860s, and much exploited in Manet’s work.⁵⁸ In La Lecture (1848–83; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 1944 17), for example, Manet’s wife Suzanne Leenhoff wears an informal day dress, with black sash, featuring a solid white bodice with transparent over‐blouse crossed over at the front, with long sleeves and ruffled edges. The dress here, extremely informal, and to some degree puzzling, is neither clearly a day nor evening dress.⁵⁹ The short sleeves would have been appropriate for evening wear, rather than daywear, perhaps for a dinner or evening soirée, but not a ball or the theatre, for which a much more formal gown would have been worn, often off the shoulder and sleeveless.⁶⁰ It certainly contrasts with the white day dress depicted in Alfred Stevens’s 1879 portrait of Gonzalès at the piano, which has the same fashionable flounce at the hem, but with a high neck and long sleeves (fig. 11).

Her hairstyle is similarly fashionable, with some hair piled up on top of her head, some tresses left flowing, and a couple of curls framing her forehead. The same hairstyle features in a pastel by Manet of possibly 1874 (for which see below) and in Morisot’s The Sisters (1869; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, inv. 1952.9.2): a ‘coiffure à l’imperatrice’, popularised by Empress Eugénie.⁶¹

Gonzalès sits on a faux bamboo chair with a rattan seat. On the floor is a floral‐patterned pale blue carpet. Resting against her chair is a portfolio on its side, its handles in cream paint. In the bottom right corner a rolled‐up print bearing Manet’s signature lies next to a white peony. In her left hand she holds her palette, three brushes and a mahlstick, only one end visible and likely to be double‐ended. At least two of the brushes are square in shape (brushes with metal ferrules developed in the nineteenth century). A fourth, round in appearance and dipped in blue paint, is held out to the canvas, seemingly touching up the blue of the vase of the floral still life. Yet this still life is already finished, and placed in an ornate Louis XVI baguette frame, which is tied, for safety, to the easel with a diaphanous blue scarf.

This still life has been identified by Marianne Koos as a copy of an engraving after one of the foremost flower painters of the Ancien Régime, Jean‐Baptiste Monnoyer (1636–1699), published in Charles Blanc’s seminal compendium of European art, Histoire des Peintres de toutes les écoles (Ecole française, vol. 1, 1862), a copy of which was owned by Manet (fig. 12).⁶² The engraving reproduced not a painting, but an etching. This etching, Roses, Jasmine, Poppies, Larkspur, formed part of one of Monnoyer’s series of prints, nine large etchings (each measuring about 49 × 37.5 cm) entitled ‘Livre de plusieurs vaze de fleurs faicts d’après le naturel’, also known as ‘Vase Opaques’.⁶³

Manet made extensive use of the engravings in Blanc’s books, notably in the 1860s.⁶⁴ But such plundering was only one element of his wider practice in copying from artists of the past. Copying was considered an essential part of an artist’s training and registering as a copyist at the Musée du Louvre, as Manet did on 29 January 1850, was standard practice for artists and students.⁶⁵ Manet’s commitment was such that he incorporated figures from his copies into a number of his own paintings. In fact, his dedication to subjects taken from modern life was equalled by his engagement with the art of the past, particularly early in his career, whether evoked or openly quoted in his work.⁶⁶ Both Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe were inspired by Renaissance works, the former by Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538; Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 1890 no. 1437), which he had copied in Florence, the latter by Le Concert Champêtre (first quarter of the sixteenth century; Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 71; MR 251), previously given to Giorgione, now to Titian. In this the central group is a direct quotation from Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael, The Judgement of Paris (1510–20), almost certainly based on the engraving published in Blanc. Manet’s quotations also involved incorporating prints as actual objects, such as the Japanese woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Lifesized Dolls in the Inner Temple of Asakusa (1853), on the wall behind Morisot in Repose (about 1871; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, inv. 59.027). In Emile Zola (1868; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 2205) a trio of overlapping prints, including an etching after Diego Velázquez’s The Feast of Bacchus (1628–9; Museo del Prado, Madrid, inv. P001170), and a photograph of Olympia, hangs above the writer’s desk.⁶⁷ These prints are either works of art in their own right or reproductions after works by other artists. Nowhere else does he present a complete copy from Blanc (itself an engraving after an etching rather than a painting) transformed into an oil painting, a physical object in a frame. This particular quotation is also unusual in not involving figures, as most of his others do.

It seems probable that what sits on the easel is an actual object, but what exactly remains to be resolved, and it is only possible to present hypotheses. Three possibilities could be suggested: a copy by Manet, a copy by Gonzalès, or instead of a copy, one of Monnoyer’s actual etchings, framed to imitate an oil painting.⁶⁸ Manet’s intense period of copying dates from the first half of the 1860s, and this could possibly represent an early painted copy after the Monnoyer that was hanging around his studio. A second, and perhaps more plausible suggestion, considering that Manet concentrated on figures in his copies, would be that it was a copy by Gonzalès herself.⁶⁹ She could have made such a copy from Blanc during her time in Chaplin’s studio. Chaplin’s decorative floral schemes were typically designed in the tradition of Monnoyer, whose designs were ubiquitous in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century decorative arts, from wallpaper and porcelain to textiles. Several anonymous nineteenth‐century copies survive for the Monnoyer engraving used by Manet, and Chaplin himself is known to have painted still lifes in his manner.⁷⁰ Or, if the still life was painted by Gonzalès, was it possibly produced at the request of Manet, perhaps even as an occupation during the sittings? Making copies of engravings was a standard component of art education at the time, and a task set for beginners, although this took the form of a detailed drawing emulating the lines of the engraving, a task that Manet was perhaps parodying. A final suggestion is that what we see on the easel is one of the coloured versions of the actual etchings (of similar dimensions) rather than the engraving in Blanc’s book, and while painting the portrait Manet was also copying the etching, transforming it into an oil painting.

We cannot know the style any possible copy was painted in, but here the still life on the easel is the sketchiest part of the whole portrait. The drooping flowers are blowsy, the curving stems decorative rather than sturdy. In contrast to Monnoyer’s own paintings, the colours are pastelly rather than strong and clear. The most robust element of the whole still life is the blue vase, the very element Gonzalès is touching with her blue brush. But there is surely a reason for this particular handling, and Manet had no interest in emulating Monnoyer’s painting style. Instead, he has transformed an engraving after a seventeenth‐century etching (with all its precision) into a decorative rococo emblem, appropriate for a portrait that evoked, even encapsulated, the eighteenth century, as was recognised by the critic Philippe Burty when it was exhibited at the entrance to Gonzalès’s posthumous exhibition in 1885: ‘Manet painted her in the act of painting, as was done in the eighteenth century, to define spirit through gesture, status through setting, and habits through accessories.’⁷¹

In his piece Burty mentions in particular images of women at the easel. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been a period when opportunities for women in terms of access both to education and exhibiting had been unusually high, resulting in an explosion of female self portraits in which the artists presented themselves in the act of painting (with men also increasingly depicting women artists in such a manner).⁷² Such images were both declarations of their new status and demonstrations of their power as artists.⁷³ In a vast number of cases, despite the reality of actual practice, women portrayed themselves wearing beautiful dresses, often white, not only highlighting the nobility of fine art as opposed to the manual arts (which were distinctly dirtier), but also reinforcing their own status as successful painters. Many chose a robe en gaulle, a fashionable loose‐fitting muslin dress, or a classicising tunic dress.

Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzalès itself has been compared in particular to self portraits by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (fig. 13) and Adélaïde Labille‐Guiard (fig. 14).⁷⁴ In the latter, full‐length and decidedly grand‐manner example, exhibited at the Salon of 1785, Labille‐Guiard sits, palette in hand, resplendent in a shimmering blue silk dress that bespeaks her success. The former painted herself at work on a portrait of Queen Marie‐Antoinette for Florence’s Corridoio Vasariano, the prestigious gallery of self portraits connecting the Uffizi to the Palazzo Pitti, wearing a sober gown with an elaborate white lace collar, a sumptuous red silk sash at her waist. It is to this portrait (which was engraved several times, a vignette of which opens her biography in Blanc, and would have been known to Manet) that Gonzalès’s pose is particularly close, with her outstretched arm, the manner in which she holds her palette, and the fall of light on its rim reminiscent of the earlier work. A fundamental difference with this self portrait and indeed many others, where the artist turns to engage with the spectator, is that Gonzalès appears to be looking, in a somewhat unfocused manner, at some spot or object out of view.

The Vigée Le Brun and Labille‐Guiard self portraits and other such works are elaborate fictions. Painted with the help of mirrors, the artist sets up the pretence of working on the particular painting included in the work, when they are actually painting their own image, plus the work in progress. While most paintings inevitably result in the fixing of any movement, in these self portraits the artists have to freeze their own actions as an artist, showing their painting arm as static, held out to the canvas, when in fact it would have been continually moving up and down to take paint from the palette and apply it. With its format reflecting those of such self portraits, Manet’s portrait of Gonzalès could be viewed as a fiction of a fiction. Gonzalès is both painting and not painting. Despite the engaging suggestion that she might be painting a copy after Blanc, we can never be sure what she was doing during her interminable sittings. She is really sitting too far back to be working on what is on the easel, and the still life is in any case already finished. Although she was probably holding her outstretched arm still, as noted above it caused Manet difficulties. His reworking can be compared to the very visible multiple positions of the artist’s arm in Morisot’s depiction of her niece and only pupil, Paule Gobillard Painting (1887; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, inv. 6,500), in which the sitter was almost certainly at work during the sittings. Regardless of, or perhaps because of, all the revisions, Manet’s portrayal is to some extent lifeless, Gonzalès’s outstretched arm lacking vigour. This can be contrasted with real self portraits: to some extent with the Vigée Le Brun, and even more with such a work as Marguerite Gérard’s Artist painting a Portrait of a Musician (before 1803; The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, inv. ГЭ‐1129), where her exposed arm (inspired by classical dress, bare arms were deemed appropriate for both day and evening at the time of Gérard’s painting) raised to the canvas is powerful and purposeful.⁷⁵ But whether Gonzalès was painting or not, there was still plenty of paint around, including on her held‐out brush, so Manet probably worked on the dress separately, which was customary practice in portraiture, to save it from the danger of falling paint.

Such a convention of depicting an artist (or indeed yourself) at their easel continued to be exploited at this period; the now little‐known artist Frédéric Thorin also exhibited Jeune femme à son chevalet at the Salon of 1870.⁷⁶ But the late nineteenth century witnessed a crucial development in such portrayals. Perhaps in an attempt to distance themselves from fashion plates in journals, where palettes and easels were included as accessories, many women artists started to portray themselves in smocks and aprons, highlighting their skill and expertise by means of appropriate professional dress.⁷⁷ And men could follow suit: in contrast to Manet’s portrayal, Henri Fantin‐Latour, in his Study: Portrait of Sarah Budgett (1883; Musée des Beaux‐Arts de Tournai, inv. 208), depicted his sitter dressed in her protective apron, seated in front of her blank canvas (his choice for her subject of a vase of daffodils, if predictable, probably derives in part from his own practice as a prolific flower painter). Similarly, Gonzalès’s own portrayal of her sister, La jeune élève, portrays her in an apron, at work on a painting that we cannot see.⁷⁸

Eva Gonzalès can also be compared to La Pittura, the Art of Painting personified by a woman, which first appeared in the sixteenth century, popularised by Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia.⁷⁹ Any self portrait by a woman showing herself in the act of painting had the potential to be interpreted as such a personification, and Vigée Le Brun’s first self portrait of 1774 was titled La Peinture.⁸⁰ But in depicting themselves as active practitioners such late eighteenth‐century women were also confronting this symbolism.⁸¹

In self portraits or paintings depicting artists, what they chose to portray on their easel was undoubtedly significant. In presenting herself painting the queen, Vigée Le Brun was highlighting both her skills and success as a portraitist.⁸² But aside from this possible copy, Gonzalès had painted no flower piece by this time, so by presenting a subject that had nothing to do with her own work, and was moreover finished, Manet broke with this convention. Apart from its appropriately eighteenth‐century flavour, what should be made of the choice of the floral still life for the picture on the easel? Restrictions in education for women, touched upon above, also influenced attitudes to their working professionally (which included making copies on commission), and even genres they were able to tackle. Grand subjects such as history and mythology were generally viewed as the preserve of men. At the other end of the scale there was a long tradition of flowers being considered as suitable subjects for women to engage in, with what critics called their modest gifts and delicate touch. In his 1860 article examining the role women should play in the arts, art historian Léon Lagrange wrote of their preferred genres (meaning those he felt appropriate), among which, ‘flowers, emanators of grace and freshness, with which only women can wrestle with freshness and grace’.⁸³

So, could viewers only have seen the flower still life with respect to women’s painting at the time? In fact, when Manet’s portrait was exhibited at the Salon of 1870, while no one recognised that it was a copy after Monnoyer, one critic saw it in terms of Manet himself, writing that Gonzalès was ‘in the process of making a little Manet’.⁸⁴ They would have been thinking of Manet’s still lifes of the 1860s, in particular A Vase of Peonies on a Small Pedestal (1864; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 1669), featuring a fallen peony of which the white peony thrown at the hem of her dress, a counterpoint to the flatly decorative still life, is an echo (fig. 15). This flower, which is even more strongly reminiscent of that in Branch of White Peonies and Secateurs (fig. 16), can be seen as Manet’s signature, a self‐reference, and certainly more of a ‘little Manet’ than the still life, which could perhaps be termed instead ‘a little Chaplin’, a nod to Gonzalès’s former teacher, who, it is to be remembered, made a speciality of flower still lifes painted in an eighteenth‐century manner.⁸⁵ It is also important to note that in his portraits Manet often associated women with flowers, nowhere more so than in his portrait of Jeanne Demarsy, Spring (1881; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, inv. 2014.62), who was described as ‘a living flower’ by Maurice Du Seigneur at the Salon of 1882.⁸⁶ Yet again, Manet sets the real against the decorative or imitation. In this portrait Demarsy wears a flowered dress and a bonnet trimmed with artificial blooms, and she is set against and almost blends into a backdrop of dense foliage and flowers.

But apart from this one critic who seemed to imply that Gonzalès was making a copy of, or at the very least evoking, her teacher’s work, no one made any explicit comment on her ‘painting’ flowers, suggesting that it was considered perfectly natural for a woman to be painting such a subject. And such a disregard also ignored what she herself exhibited at this, her first Salon (in 1870), all figure pieces, for which she received unanimous (yet cautionary) praise, including The Bugler (1869–70), which was bought by the state at her father’s request.⁸⁷ An exception perhaps was artist and critic Zacharie Astruc’s review of the women exhibitors at the Salon, containing in his evaluation of Gonzalès what was possibly an oblique reference to Manet’s choice of flowers. Writing generally, he acknowledged women’s restricted opportunities and how they were forced into the private studios, citing Chaplin’s in particular. As with Lagrange he singled out their ‘particular delicacies’ and ‘different aptitudes’ (ideal for flower painting), but in the case of Gonzalès herself, labelled her work as masculine, writing that if she carried on as she had started she would be called ‘Monsieur Eva’, that is, she was good because she naturally painted like a man, rather than as a woman trying to imitate a man.⁸⁸

During this period Manet was himself sitting to Fantin‐Latour for his A Studio in the Batignolles (1870; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 729) also exhibited at the Salon of 1870. Seated next to Astruc, whose portrait he is painting, Manet is shown surrounded by an admiring cohort of progressive painters and writers, including Emile Zola, Pierre‐Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet.⁸⁹ It has been suggested that Manet’s portrait of Gonzalès can be seen as the feminine counterpart to Fantin’s Studio.⁹⁰ Perhaps Manet, mindful that neither Gonzalès nor Morisot were included in Fantin’s painting despite their association with the avant‐garde, devised his own homage to his talented pupil. In his monumental portrait he combined elements from the self portraiture and grand‐manner style of Vigée Le Brun and Labille‐Guillard. He presented his pupil as the artist she was, yet chose to portray her ‘painting’ a flower piece. In her beautiful dress, positioned with real flowers on one side and painted blooms on the other, Gonzalès could be said to occupy a space somewhere between a professional artist and a society beauty, a portrayal which has led to both feminist critiques of the portrait and a dilution of Gonzalès as a serious painter.⁹¹ But the representation is complex, and in depicting her seated in front of a finished and framed still life that had nothing to do with her own practice at the time, was Manet instead addressing his own practice of copying from the past? And was the decorous portrayal aiming to dilute the ambitions of a woman painter, which remained problematic at this period? Yet, even if mannered, or indeed artificial, the portrait remains a remarkable testament to an artist who was already forging her own path.

Manet’s portrait was fully finished on 12 March 1870, just before the final submission date of 20 March.⁹² It was one of two paintings exhibited by Manet in 1870, the other being Music Lesson (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, inv. 69.1123), both of which Morisot mentioned seeing in the studio (Manet’s?) the day before the Salon opened.⁹³ Contrary to the reception of Gonzalès’s own works, it earned the ire of the critics, with Théodore Duret almost a lone voice with his evaluation of its natural pose and figure full of movement.⁹⁴ As for others, she was compared to ‘a waxen doll propped on a living body’, bearing a ‘chalky physiognomy’ and with ‘a nose like a parrot’s beak’.⁹⁵ Even Gonzalès herself was considered complicit in the outrage, with Armand Lapointe writing to her father on 2 June 1870: ‘What strange complacency, when one is young and beautiful, to allow one’s portrait to be painted by Manet! Oh, Miss Gonzalès is very guilty!’⁹⁶

Manet subsequently presented the portrait to Gonzalès. It is not known whether the likeness pleased either her or her family, with the only reference to any reaction being a statement from art historian Claude Roger‐Marx, to the effect that the family did not appear to think highly enough of it to provide a frame.⁹⁷ When the Belgian critic Camille Lemonnier visited Gonzalès’s studio in 1874, he observed that it was placed on an easel at the back.⁹⁸

After her premature death from an embolism following childbirth in 1883, the painting was inherited by her husband, the engraver and friend of Manet, Henri Guérard, whom she had married in 1879.⁹⁹ It was displayed prominently at the beginning of her posthumous exhibition at the Salons de la Vie Moderne in 1885, the critic Ernest Franquelin noting that it was placed on an easel rather than being hung, and that to the right was The Bugler, as a pendant (and photographs of the exhibition in the Bibliothèque nationale show The Bugler placed on a low easel similar to the one pictured in Eva Gonzalès in Manet’s Studio, fig. 17).¹⁰⁰ Franquelin further mentions that flowers had been placed on the easel itself, and that they too were fading in the sadness at her loss. Her untimely death lent even more poignancy to renewed criticism of Manet’s likeness prompted by its exhibition, with Charles Bigot commenting on her pallid arms and face and her eyes without expression, and only Octave Mirbeau calling it ‘superb’.¹⁰¹

Other Likenesses

At the same period Manet also painted a much smaller, much less formal image of Eva Gonzalès in his own studio (fig. 17).¹⁰² Seen from the back, she is dressed in a grey day dress tied with a black sash very similar to that depicted in the full‐length portrait. Perched on the table next to her is Manet’s wife’s son, Léon Leenhoff, dressed as a matador, and adopting a pose from Manet’s Toreadors (1862–3; Hill‐Stead Museum, Farmington).¹⁰³ Directly to her right is Manet’s portrait of Lola de Valence (1862; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 1991), a star of a Spanish ballet troupe that visited Paris in 1862. While Gonzalès is holding a palette in her left hand, it is not certain whether she is working on one of her own paintings, or has paused to contemplate a work by Manet, again apparently complete, framed and placed on a wheeled easel. In his manuscript register of Manet’s works Leenhoff identifies the painting as her own, The Bugler.¹⁰⁴ Its dimensions mirror those of the painting, and Manet has included a horn at lower left. It has also been suggested that she could be contemplating what may be an early version of The Balcony, with its ironwork hinted at the left.¹⁰⁵ This picture is unlocated, and without seeing it in the flesh it is very hard to decipher what exactly is being depicted, particularly as, unlike the others shown, the painting in front of Gonzalès has a bloomy surface rather like the floral screen set just behind. It could be that there is a figure seen from the back, swathed in a cloak, black hair surmounted with a black hat. One extremely tentative suggestion is that it is not a real picture, but also a quotation from Toreadors, the bullfighter on the left who is saluting a statue of the Virgin before the fight, situated next to the seated figure on which Manet based Leenhoff. Gonzalès is thus posed between the two, enshrined, not in flowers, but in her Spanish heritage.

During the same period as painting the portrait Manet made an etching of Gonzalès in profile (fig. 18).¹⁰⁶ A few years later, around the time Gonzalès was painting her Theatre Box at the Italiens (see fig. 10, above), he made a study for a painting, never realised, A Couple in a Theatre Box (pastel on canvas, 57 × 71cm), in which the head of the woman is traditionally identified as a portrait of Eva Gonzalès, seated alongside Léon Leenhoff.¹⁰⁷ Related to this is a further pastel, Eva Gonzalès (fig. 19), which while generally dated to about 1879, is probably another study for the unrealised composition.¹⁰⁸

Later still, Manet sketched her features (in profile) along with those of her husband Henri Guérard, in a letter of 27 September 1880 written from Bellevue, where he was taking the waters at the spa (fig. 20). On the verso he added a stem of morning glory, a flower used as a symbol of friendship.¹⁰⁹ In this letter Manet asks about a self portrait that she has never sent: ‘I was hoping for a sketch both of you and by you, dear Madame Eva, and won’t let you forget it.’ This is not surprising. Throughout her career Gonzalès preferred to use her sister’s features and only a few portraits have been tentatively identified as self portraits.¹¹⁰ One of these, of about 1873–4, which features a ‘tube à dessin’ (tube for carrying drawings), has been cited as an example of where she mixed her own features with those of her sister, painting her eyes and chin in the oval of Jeanne’s face.¹¹¹ It was included in her 1885 posthumous exhibition as Portrait de Mlle EG (no. 33), of which Octave de Parisis asked whether it was through an absurd modesty that she had spoiled her own admirable face.¹¹² In the 1932 exhibition of her work at Galerie Marcel Bernheim her son Jean‐Raymond Guérard titled it Portrait de Jeanne Gonzalès.

Just as Eva Gonzalès used her sister Jeanne as a constant model throughout her life, Jeanne Gonzalès also drew and painted her elder sister, for example in a portrait of about 1870.¹¹³ In about 1880 she painted her in Dieppe.¹¹⁴ The profile in this painting is similar to that in a work, stamped Eva Gonzalès, which has also been tentatively cited as a self portrait of about 1875.¹¹⁵

In 1879 Alfred Stevens painted the aforementioned portrait of Gonzalès seated at the piano (see fig. 11, above). Norbert Goeneutte depicted her a number of times, of which two portraits of her in profile are known.¹¹⁶ See also Henri Guérard’s Tête de Femme, Eva Gonzalès, after Norbert Goeneutte.¹¹⁷ Finally, there are listed in Guérard’s inventory portraits of both Eva Gonzalès and her mother Madame Gonzalès by Eugène Quesnet (1815–1899), now untraced.¹¹⁸

Orpen, Homage to Manet

After borrowing the painting for exhibitions in Dublin and Belfast, the Irish collector, dealer and philanthropist Hugh Lane bought it from Durand‐Ruel for the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin (now the Hugh Lane Gallery).¹¹⁹ Along with other paintings he stored it in his house in South Bolton Gardens, London. One of its rooms was being used as a studio by William Orpen, who incorporated it into his conversation piece, Homage to Manet (see fig. 8, above).¹²⁰ A group of men sit or stand around a table, above which the portrait hangs prominently. At the left sits the Irish artist and writer George Moore, who had got to know Manet personally and been painted by him during his sojourn in Paris. Moore is reading aloud from his 1904 lecture, Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters, published in 1906, to Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks, Dugald Sutherland MacColl, Walter Sickert and Lane himself. It is an acknowledgement both of the esteem with which Manet was held by progressive artists in Britain and Ireland, and of the importance of the portrait for Lane’s project. Moore had spoken at length about the portrait in his lecture, and in particular asserted that, given the choice between The Itinerant Musician (The Old Musician, 1862; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, inv. 1963.10.162), also borrowed by Lane from Durand‐Ruel for the exhibition, and Eva Gonzalès, he would choose the latter: ‘I have been asked which of the two pictures hanging in this room it would be better to buy for the Gallery of Modern Art, “The Itinerant Musician” or the portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzalès … The portrait is an article of faith. It says: “Be not ashamed of anything, but to be ashamed”. Never did Manet paint more unashamedly. There are Manets that I like more, but the portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzalès is what Dublin needs.’¹²¹

Provenance

Given to Eva Gonzalès by Edouard Manet; after her death in 1883 the painting passed to her husband Henri Guérard; in Guérard’s Inventaire après décès of 5 April 1897, par Anne Charles Champetier de Ribes, notaire à Paris: the portrait is listed in the salon next to the atelier on the second floor, ‘Portrait of Eva Gonzalès’ by Manet;¹²² after his death in 1897 the painting passed to his widow, Jeanne Guérard‐Gonzalès (1852–1924), Gonzalès’s sister, whom Guérard had married after her death;¹²³ with Gaston‐Alexandre Camentron (1862–1919), from whom bought by Paul Durand‐Ruel in 1899; acquired from Durand‐Ruel by Hugh Lane in 1906: according to Thomas Bodkin, Lane was short of money at this time and exchanged the pictures by Manet for others by Nicolas Lancret and Thomas Gainsborough; Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917; at the Tate Gallery, 1919, from where transferred, 1950.

Exhibitions

Paris 1870 (1852); Paris 1884 (56); Paris 1885 (not numbered); Paris 1900a (no catalogue);¹²⁴ Paris 1900b (443); Munich 1901 (1118a, ex‐catalogue); Berlin 1901 (not numbered);¹²⁵ probably Berlin 1902 (no catalogue);¹²⁶ Vienna 1903 (31); Weimar 1904 (9), lent by Durand‐Ruel;¹²⁷ Dresden 1904, lent by Durand‐Ruel (marked with an asterisk as for sale); Dublin 1904, lent by Durand‐Ruel to the Royal Hibernian Academy (4);¹²⁸ London 1905 (101); Paris 1905 (8); Belfast 1906 (69); on loan to the Municipal Gallery, Dublin, 1908–13 (122); London 1917 (not numbered); London 1954 (10); long‐term loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 17 January 1961–26 January 1966 ; long‐term loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 19 January 1971–25 November 1975 ; London 1977 (not numbered); long‐term loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 15 October 1979–12 July 1983 ; London 1983 (24); long‐term loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 12 October 1983–16 September 1991 ; Dublin 1991 (4); long‐term loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 13 November 1991–21 November 1999 ; Weimar 1999 (32); long‐term loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin (Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane), 16 November 1999–1 November 2005 ; Paris and Baltimore 2000–1 (30; Musée d’Orsay only); long‐term loan to the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 9 June 2004–27 March 2006 ; Dublin 2008 (not numbered); long‐term loan to the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 31 December 2012–20 October 2019 ; Toledo and London 2012–13 (21); Paris, London and Philadelphia 2014–15 (26); Dublin and London 2022–3 (not numbered).

Literature

Anon. 1870a; Anon. 1870b; Baignières 1870; Bertrand 1870, p. 319; Bleu‐de‐ciel 1870; Castagnary 1870; Chaumelin 1870; Debitte 1870; De Pontmartin 1870; Duret 1870; Fournel 1870; Gachet 1870; Klein 1870; Lafenestre 1870; Laurent‐Pichat 1870; Merson 1870; Pichat 1870; Stani 1870; Térigny 1870; Wolff 1870, p. 2; Lemonnier 1874; Bazire 1884, pp. 63–4, 76–7, 82; Burty 1885; Bigot 1885; Escoffier 1885; Franquelin 1885; Gauchez 1885; Gautier 1885; Javel 1885; Mirbeau 1885; Von Ostini 1901; Boll 1901; Rosenhagen 1901, cited in Echte, Feilchenfeldt and Cordioli 2011, pp. 62–3; Vollmar 1901, cited in Echte, Feilchenfeldt and Cordioli 2011, pp. 65–6; Von Tschudi 1902; Duret 1902, no. 129; Servaes 1903, p. 2; Anon. 1905; Duret 1906, pp. 105–7; Moore 1906, pp. 18–20, 28, 30; Moreau‐Nélaton 1906, no. 127; Harrison 1908, p. 25, no. 122; Meier‐Graefe 1912, pl. 89; Proust 1913, pp. 56, 134, 155, 165; Philips 1917; Duret 1919, no. 56; Moreau‐Nélaton 1926, vol. 1, pp. 112–13; Flament 1928, pp. 280–3; Huyghe 1929; Tabarant 1931, pp. 14, 206–7, no. 157; Bayle 1932a, pp. 110, 112–13; Bayle 1932b; Bodkin 1932/1956, pl. XLI (1932 edn), pl. XLII (1956 edn); Colin 1932, pp. 36–7; Jamot, Wildenstein and Bataille 1932, vol. 1, p. 139, no. 174; Venturi 1939, vol. 2, p. 192; Jedlicka 1941, pp. 108, 110, 112, 213, 215–16, 234–5, 303–4, 307; Tabarant 1947, pp. 158–9, 163, 171–2, 177–8, 507–8; Bouret 1950; Roger‐Marx 1950; Rouart 1950, pp. 32–40; Hamilton 1954, pp. 140–7, 208, 264; Sandblad 1954, p. 65; Plesters 1956, p. 116; Yeats 1961, p. 242; Davies and Gould 1970, pp. 89–91; Bazin 1972, pp. 8, 45; Rouart and Wildenstein 1975, vol. 1, p. 142, no. 154; Baligand 1978, pp. 196–9 ; Wilson 1983, pp. 41–3; Adler 1986, p. 141; Rouart 1986, pp. 40–52; Darragon 1989, pp. 178–82; Sainsaulieu and De Mons 1990, p. 12; Wilson‐Bareau 1991, p. 52; House et al. 1994, pp. 228–30; Tinterow and Loyrette 1994, pp. 158–9; Brombert 1996, pp. 241–2; Körner 1996, pp. 138–40; Mauner and Loyrette 2000, p. 103, no. 30; Garb 2001; Wilson‐Bareau 2001; Armstrong 2002, pp. 184–93; Mena Marqués et al. 2003, p. 338; Wilson‐Bareau 2003, p. 250; Garb 2007, pp. 58–94; Lehmbeck 2007, pp. 89ff.; Rubin 2010, pp. 161–2, 166, 324; Koos 2015; Koos 2017, pp. 44–9; Beeny 2019, p. 103; Herring et al. 2022; Kramer 2023, pp. 188–96.

Notes