Dimensions 16 3/4 x 10 5/8 in. (42.5 x 27 cm) (image)23 3/8 x 17 7/16 x 2 9/16 in. (59.37 x 44.29 x 6.51 cm) (outer frame)
Eva Gonzales made this pastel drawing, Lady with a Fan, with dry pigments on paper. Unlike oil paint, pastels don’t blend easily, and that gives the work its distinctive, slightly grainy texture. The softness of the pastel medium is well-suited to capturing the play of light on the woman’s silk dress, and the diaphanous fabric of her sleeves. This would have been a costly fabric, indicative of the sitter’s high social status; so too the fan, a delicate and highly crafted object. But while Gonzales clearly appreciated these refined materials, her interest seems to have been equally focused on capturing the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. You can see that in the hazy background, where the sea and sky seem to merge. Ultimately, it's the combination of Gonzales’s technical skill and her sensitivity to the social context of her time that makes this work so compelling. It invites us to look beyond the surface, and to consider the complex relationship between art, craft, and society.
Comments
Like Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and other women who found recognition in the male-dominated art world of late 19th-century France, Eva Gonzalès used family members as models. Her younger sister Jeanne figured frequently in her work and is surely the model for this pastel. Gonzalès made the drawing at the age of twenty-two, the year she entered Édouard Manet’s studio—as his only formal pupil. Soft and velvety in execution, this work is a masterly composition of arcs and bends, the pleated fan echoed in the pleated sleeves and the thick folds of the gown. Gonzalès’s audience would have known the language of the fan, an indispensable accessory newly revived with Napoleon III’s marriage to the Spanish-born Eugénie de Montijo in 1853. Here the fan does not serve for modesty or seduction but instead symbolically conceals the woman’s private thoughts. Head turned away, her reverie is inward and unknowable. The shimmering dress and fan distract our attention so she can be left to herself.
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