Lady with a Fan

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.