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A young woman sits and a young girl stands at an open, wide, vine-covered gate in front of a park in this horizontal painting. Both people have pale, peachy skin. The woman sits at the center of the opening with her body facing us, and she looks at or toward us with dark eyes under dark eyebrows. She tips her head slightly to her left, our right, and her brown hair has been pulled up under an ivory-white hat with a dark feather that curves over her hair toward her ears. Like the rest of the painting, her features are loosely painted but her pink lips are closed. Her pale shell-pink shawl flares over her shoulders to her elbows, and is fastened with a black ribbon or tie at her neck. A touch of black at her waist suggests she wears a black sash, and her full skirt falls in layered tiers to the ground. Her hands rest in her lap, and she holds long-stemmed flowers with red, baby-blue, and butter-yellow blooms. Next to the woman and to our left, the girl stands facing our left in profile with her hands on the trellised gate, which has swung away from us, into the park. Her blond hair is held back with a black headband and she looks down, her face turned slightly away. Her long-sleeved, loosely fitting, slate-blue jumper has pale blue pinstripes and comes to her knees. She wears white stockings, and her black boots come up over her ankles. An open umbrella with a curved wooden handle rests upside down on the ground to our right of the woman. The interior is deep turquois blue and the exterior is parchment brown. The park is painted with tones of pale caramel brown for the ground, and sage green and tan for the trees. Tree trunks and branches are painted with a few lines in brown, and there is a hedge of pine-green bushes beyond the gate to our right. Sunlight filters through the trees to create dappled shadows on the ground. The artist signed the work as if she had written her name along the bottom rail of the gate door, near the lower left corner of the painting: “Eva Gonzalèz.”

Nanny and Child, 1877/1878

Eva Gonzalès

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 89

Born into a wealthy Parisian family, Eva Gonzalès focused on the experiences of upper-class women, drawing from her own observations. This painting presents a familiar scene of domestic life: a nanny tending to her charge. Seated in a garden on a lazy summer day, the nanny seems distracted. Like the parasol lying at her feet, her responsibilities are briefly forgotten. The little girl plays nearby, also lost in her own world. Is Gonzalès drawing parallels between the two?

Dive deeper

Although a close associate of the impressionists who shared their dedication to the portrayal of modern life, Eva Gonzalès never participated in their group exhibitions. Born into an artistic family—her father was a well-known writer and her mother an accomplished musician—Gonzalès discovered her vocation at an early age. In 1865, the sixteen-year-old Gonzalès began her formal studies under Charles Chaplin, a society painter who ran a well-known art studio for women. She remained under his tutelage for two years.

In February 1869, Gonzalès was introduced to Edouard Manet. He painted her portrait and she soon became his student, the only one that Manet ever acknowledged. Manet’s influence was profound. Like her mentor, Gonzalès revealed a marked preference for subjects drawn from modern life, but it is in her technique with its emphasis upon overall tonal relationships and the privileging of form over detail that Manet’s influence is truly felt. This is particularly apparent in early works such as The Little Soldier (Musée Gaston Rapin, Villeneuve-sur-Lot), the painting with which she made her debut at the Salon of 1870.

Nanny and Child is perhaps Gonzalès’ most accomplished work. Executed at Dieppe, a locale Gonzalès frequented throughout the 1870s, this painting is a subtle, yet unmistakable homage to Manet’s great painting The Railway (1956.10.1). Gonzalès used the same compelling interplay of figures: the seated nanny who gazes out at the viewer and a young charge who grasps the bars of a fence, her body turned away and her features shown in lost profile. As in Manet’s painting, the brushwork here is lush, the forms vigorously drawn and detail minimized, the palette restrained and low key.

Most striking, however, are the ways in which Gonzalès consciously diverged from Manet’s model. Whereas Manet’s work feels somewhat claustrophobic, with figures trapped between the shallow foreground and the black metal bars of the fence behind them, Gonzalès’ painting delights in open space. Despite the summary depiction of the garden, she reveals a sensitivity to the play of sunlight as it peeks through the trees and dapples the ground, suggesting that she may have painted the work at least in part out of doors. Consequently, the figures seem to inhabit a landscape, rather than pose against a backdrop. Nanny and Child is not a mere imitation of Manet’s painting, but a thoughtful and highly original response to the subject, reimagined and transformed into something entirely new and undeniably her own.

This painting was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1878, where it was shown under the title Miss et bébé. Contemporary audiences would have easily recognized the allusion to the nanny’s English nationality, a sign of wealth and prestige in a class-conscious society. Critical response to the work was mixed. While the writer Eugène Véron considered the little girl pretty and the overall composition satisfying, he found the modeling of the nanny lacking and likened her to a Japanese print, which was viewed as negative at the time. The critic Castagnary was more appreciative, however, admiring Gonzalès’ ability to capture nature in rapid strokes. Gonzalès’ career was brief. She died during childbirth in 1883 at the age of thirty-four, just six days after the death of her mentor Manet. Gonzalès left behind a modest oeuvre of paintings and pastels; eighty-eight of them, including Nanny and Child, were shown in a posthumous retrospective held at the Salons de la Vie Moderne.

NotesEugène Véron, "Le Salon de Paris, scènes de la vie contemporaine," L’Art, 14 (1878), 161–162.Castagnary, Salons (1857–1879), vol. 2 (Paris, 1892), 350.

Object Data

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 65 × 81.4 cm (25 9/16 × 32 1/16 in.)

framed: 87.95 × 103.51 × 9.53 cm (34 5/8 × 40 3/4 × 3 3/4 in.)

Credit Line

Chester Dale Fund

Accession Number

2006.72.1

Artists / Makers

Eva Gonzalès (painter) French, 1849 - 1883

Image Use

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Detail Information

Inscription

lower left: Eva Gonzalès

Provenance

The artist [1849-1883], Paris; (her estate sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 20 February 1885, no. 54). Lanvin, Paris, at least in 1932.[1] Acquired 1994 by Simon Rosenberg; purchased 10 July 2006 through (Brame & Lorenceau, Paris) by NGA.

[1] This is possibly the fashion designer Jeanne Lanvin. At least some of her collection was inherited into the Polignac family, into which her daughter had married.

Associated Names

Brame, Hector
Drouot, Hôtel
Lanvin, Jeanne, Mme

Exhibition History

1878: Exposition nationale des beaux-arts (Salon), Palais des Champs-Elysées, Paris, 1878, no. 1046.

1885: L'exposition-rétrospective d'Eva Gonzalès en 1885, galleries of the journal La Vie Moderne, Paris, 1885, no. 62.

1928: Portraits et figures de femmes. Ingres à Picasso. Exposition au bénéfice de la Société des Amis du Musée du Luxembourg. La Renaissance, Paris, 1928, no. 85.

1932: Eva Gonzalès 1849-1883, Galerie Marcel Bernheim, Paris, 1932, no. 5.

1949: L'Enfance, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 1949, no. 106, as Dans le jardin.

1950: Eva Gonzalès, Galerie Alfred Daber, Paris, 1950, no. 9.

1959: Eva Gonzalès 1849-1883, Galerie Daber, Paris, 1959, no. 6, repro.

1993: Les Femmes Impressionnistes: Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Berthe Morisot, Musée Marmottan, Paris, 1993, no. 41, repro.

2008: Woman Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, The Fine Arts Museusm of San Francisco, 2008, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2011: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The National Art Center, Tokyo; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, 2011, no. 22, repro.

Bibliography

1932: Bayle, Paul. "Éva Gonzalès." La Renaissance 6 (June 1932): 114-115, repro.

1949: Lecuyer, Raymond. "A La Galerie Charpentier: L'Enfance". France Illustration 194-220 (June 1949):16, repro (as Dans le Jardin).

1950: Roger-Marx, Claude. "Eva Gonzalès." Arts: Beaux-Arts, Littérature, Spectacles(July, 1950): 8.

1950: Roger-Marx, Claude. "Un peintre de bonheur: Eva Gonzalès." Le Figaro Littéraire (18 March 1950): 8.

1990: Sainsaulieu, Marie-Caroline and Jacques de Mons. Eva Gonzalès 1849-1883 Etude critique et catalogue raisonné. Paris, 1990: 202-203, no. 91, repro.

1994: Grant, Carol Jane. "Eva Gonzalès (1849-1883): An examination of the artist's style and subject matter." Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1994: 44,45,168,169, 190, 191, pl. XVII, x, 344.

2006: Jones, Kimberly. "Eva Gonzalès, Nanny and Child." Bulletin / National Gallery of Art, no. 35 (Fall 2006): 22-23, repro.

2016: Manœuvre, Laurent. Les pionnières: femmes et impressionnistes. Rouen, 2016: 163,165.

2017: Caso, Ángeles. Grandes Maestras Mujeres en el arte occidental. Renacimiento-Siglo XIX. Ovideo, 2017: 86, fig.. 57, 292.