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Lot Essay
La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) is an exquisite example of Eva Gonzalès’s artistic skill. Executed in the first years of the 1880s, shortly before Gonzalès’s untimely death in 1883, La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) dates from the height of the artist’s career. With vibrant colour, Gonzalès has depicted a woman reading in a garden, capturing a sense of lightness and spontaneity, accentuated through her deft use of pastel. The contrast between the bursts of red of the lady’s hat and umbrella, with the verdant tones of the green foliage, create a strikingly bold and unified composition, which demonstrates Gonzalès’s daring and innovative artistic tendencies.
The spontaneous style of La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) is evocative of Gonzalès’s teacher, Edouard Manet. Gonzalès was the only official pupil of Manet, and remained deeply devoted to him. Following his advice, Gonzalès decided not to exhibit in the momentous Impressionist group exhibitions that began in 1874, and instead pursued recognition and acceptance at the annual Salon exhibitions. The rapidly applied strokes of colour in La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) are reminiscent of the painterly style that Manet developed in the 1870s. Gonzalès’s choice of contemporary subject matter, as well as the strong contrasts of light and colour that her work displays, is a clear example of Manet’s influence on her artistic style.
The woman in La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) was Jeanne Guérard-Gonzalès, the artist’s sister, to whom the present picture once belonged. Like her female Impressionist counterparts, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, Gonzalès most frequently depicted women within domestic settings or outside, ‘en plein air’, so revealing a glimpse into her nineteenth-century Parisian world. After Gonzalès died in 1883, just days after giving birth to her son, Jeanne married Gonzalès’s widower, Henri Guérard, and brought up her son, Jean-Raymond, as her own.
La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) has been exhibited widely; in 1885, it was included in a large posthumous retrospective of Gonzalès's work, which received great acclaim. Nearly a century later, in 1993, La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) was one of the highlights of the seminal exhibition, Les femmes impressionnistes, held at the Musée Marmottan, Paris.
The spontaneous style of La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) is evocative of Gonzalès’s teacher, Edouard Manet. Gonzalès was the only official pupil of Manet, and remained deeply devoted to him. Following his advice, Gonzalès decided not to exhibit in the momentous Impressionist group exhibitions that began in 1874, and instead pursued recognition and acceptance at the annual Salon exhibitions. The rapidly applied strokes of colour in La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) are reminiscent of the painterly style that Manet developed in the 1870s. Gonzalès’s choice of contemporary subject matter, as well as the strong contrasts of light and colour that her work displays, is a clear example of Manet’s influence on her artistic style.
The woman in La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) was Jeanne Guérard-Gonzalès, the artist’s sister, to whom the present picture once belonged. Like her female Impressionist counterparts, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, Gonzalès most frequently depicted women within domestic settings or outside, ‘en plein air’, so revealing a glimpse into her nineteenth-century Parisian world. After Gonzalès died in 1883, just days after giving birth to her son, Jeanne married Gonzalès’s widower, Henri Guérard, and brought up her son, Jean-Raymond, as her own.
La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) has been exhibited widely; in 1885, it was included in a large posthumous retrospective of Gonzalès's work, which received great acclaim. Nearly a century later, in 1993, La lecture au jardin (Femme au chapeau rouge) was one of the highlights of the seminal exhibition, Les femmes impressionnistes, held at the Musée Marmottan, Paris.