Gonzalés VII

Description

Eva Gonzalés VII

When was the last time you looked into your letterbox and found personal mail? “A long time ago” you probably say. It is likely you yourself haven’t written any “snail mail” or postcards since the emergence of e-mail and electronic postcard services. Sending all your relatives Holiday Greetings with just one ‘click’ seemed so attractive. You even could make it ‘highly personalized’ with photo’s of you and your friends or your spouse and kids and send them over the internet. Or even better, order them to be printed and sent.

But that is not the same as picking up mail from the mailbox and while you walk back indulging your curiosity about “who wrote that lovely ‘wish’ – maybe even with an old-style fountain pen – on a postcard that delights the eye in such a way?” Experiencing the pleasure to place it in clear vision for the coming weeks, so the front and the back of that card will bring a smile on our face whenever it catches your attention again.

That will absolutely happen with cards featuring female painters. Their paintings can be found in museums like Louvre, Hermitage, National Gallery in London or Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There is a common denominator in most their stories, however, and that is experiencing opposition working in a man’s world.

Eva Gonzalès (1849 —1883), raised by her father who was a writer, and her mother a musician, is known for her portrayals of contemporary Parisian life and her association with Édouard Manet. Though she was a contemporary of the Impressionists and is often spaced in that group, she adhered more to a realist aesthetic.
Through her father’s connections she met a variety of members of the Parisian cultural elite, In this way was exposed to the new ideas surrounding art and literature at the time from a young age. At the age of 16, she started as a student of portraitist Charles Chaplin. Three years later she became model and student of Édouard Manet. Her introduction at “Le Salon” -the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris- was overshadowed by the portrait Manet made of her which was exhibited at the same time.

Gonzalès’s work has been criticized because of the overt similarities with Manet. Her style aligns closely to that of Manet’s Spanish period. Slight changes were made through the years through which she developed a more personal style using a sober palette, while Manet started to use more brilliant colors in a more impressionist way. She was praised for her inherent intuition with which she approached art, a sense of sincere personal expression that gives it significant value, and producing paintings which challenged the way female painters were viewed

Eva died in childbirth at the age of 34, just 5 days after the death of Manet.

I Portrait of a Woman in White, 1879
II The Little Lever, 1875
III La Toilette, 1879
IV Morning Awakening, 1876 (detail)
V Morning Awakening, 1876
VI The Milliner, c. 1877
VII Bouquet of Violets

Specifications
• 4/4 full bleed
• 300 GSM
• Paper thickness: 0.13″ (0.34 mm)
• Laminated feel
• White matte back with a small QR code or a bar code