WPI is pleased to announce the commencement of the Eva Gonzalès Digital Catalogue Raisonné.
This ambitious undertaking will mark the first digital catalogue raisonné for a woman artist on the Institute’s growing roster.
The artist’s légataire universel has authorized Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu to lead the project, which will provide academics, provenance researchers, and the general public with an extensive and accessible digital publication that will advance the study of the artist’s oeuvre.
EVA GONZALÈS (1847 – 1883)
Eva Gonzalès was a French painter best known for her portraits and works depicting intimate, daily life. The daughter of a writer and a musician, Gonzalès began drawing and painting at a young age. At around the age of twenty-one, Gonzalès met Édouard Manet, who would eventually serve as her mentor. In 1870, she exhibited her work for the first time at the Paris Salon.
Though she was a contemporary of the Impressionists, she varied from them stylistically, and chose to remain within the academic salon system. Her promising career was interrupted by her death at the age of thirty-six.
Adding artworks previously unpublished in the 1990 catalogue raisonné co-authored by Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu and Jacques de Mons, and with updates to records on many works, some of which are known exclusively through photographs of exhibition rooms at the Salon de la Vie Moderne (1885), this expanded iteration will be critical to broadening the art historical discourse surrounding the life and work of an important 19th century artist.
“With the Wildenstein Plattner Institute publishing a new digital edition of the catalogue raisonné released in 1990, the renown of Eva Gonzalès thus takes off anew. The artist, whose career was short but dense, joins the pantheon of great painters.” –Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu
Published online and accessible free of charge, the project will encompass all of the techniques used by Gonzalès, including oil painting, pastel, watercolor, and charcoal, and cover genres ranging from portraits to landscapes to still lifes.
The WPI will begin to host committees to review works submitted for possible inclusion in the catalogue raisonné in the fall of 2022.
Requests for inclusion can be submitted through the WPI’s webportal.
