Girl with Cherries

A young girl in a frilled linen collar is lit dramatically against a dark ground, a small dish of bright cherries before her — a freely painted figure study in the Spanish manner that Eva Gonzalès had absorbed through her teacher. Gonzalès, the daughter of an affluent literary family, became Édouard Manet’s first and only official pupil in 1869, and this picture of about 1870 shows the clear debt of her early work to his contemporary Spanish-style canvases: the broad, confident brushwork and the figure emerging from shadow. She exhibited at the Salon from 1870 and died in childbirth in 1883 at thirty-four, leaving a small and increasingly admired body of work. The canvas belonged to the American painter William Merritt Chase, was sold at his New York sale in 1896 as Fruit Girl, and after passing through Durand-Ruel and other hands was acquired by the Art Institute in 1940 for the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.