Eva Gonzalès (1849–1883) was born in Paris on 19 April 1849 into a bourgeois family of Spanish origin. Her father was the writer Emmanuel Gonzalès, and she grew up among authors and artists. At sixteen she began lessons with the fashionable portraitist Charles Chaplin, and in 1869 she met Édouard Manet, who painted her portrait and took her on as a pupil. That portrait was shown at the Salon of 1870, the year she made her own Salon debut with Le Clairon.
Her work was often criticised for resembling her teacher’s, and her paintings share his dark grounds and pale, strongly lit faces. But she painted her own subjects: still lifes, gardens and quiet interiors, in oil, pastel and watercolour, and a box at the opera in Une loge aux Italiens. After the Salon of 1879, where she showed that picture, critics finally began to take her seriously. Like Manet, she never exhibited with the Impressionists, though she is usually counted among them.
In 1879 she married Henri Guérard, the engraver of Manet’s prints. She died in Paris in May 1883, aged thirty-four, of complications after giving birth to their son, only days after Manet’s own death. A retrospective of her work was held in 1885 at the Salons de la Vie Moderne.