It's a very strange scene in many ways.
The original sketch, which nobody has seen
for 150 years.
Where the women's eyes rest tell and massive part of the story.
It kind of is a call to action to reopen the Pandora's Box of art history.
My name is Jesse Jones and I'm an artist based in Dublin.
This painting is a painting of Eva Gonzalès by Edouard Manet.
We're looking at a woman sitting
on a chair in quite a nice kind of drawing room.
Like very beautiful woven carpet, like very fine room.
It doesn't look totally like a place you
would make art because, regardless of getting paint on your dress,
you really wouldn't want to get paint on that carpet.
And then a portfolio
which I imagine is her portfolio.
And then we have her painting on an easel.
There's a lot of complicated things
happening around femininity and, at the time, who gets to be an artist.
We talk about this painting because it's a Manet.
We have to read her name through his name.
But Eva Gonzalès was also an incredible painter.
It must have been so hard to be a woman artist at that time
and really have conviction about your work and then not be taken seriously.
That must have been exhausting.
It was difficult to access classes or the Academy or paint from the nude.
And then it must have been heartbreaking to see mediocre painters do really well.
That must have been annoying.
For women to be excluded for so long is a very lonely place.
For Gonzalès, she would be downplayed or thought of as a second option.
When you look at Eva Gonzalès's work
and Manet's work, they were completely each other's peers.
After she was his student for so long
their paintings grew at the same time
and he developed in tandem with her.
And he didn't have any other mentees.
He didn't work with any other artists.
She was the only one he worked with.
Why would somebody only work with one person?
There's something about their friendship that is important for Manet.
I remember seeing it so many times when I was a teenager in the Hugh Lane.
I was always struck by the darkness and her white dress.
She really stands out on this black background.
I think we only see her.
We don't see what's happening in the background.
She's not just this object to be looked at.
She's important.
I suppose the thing that I find most
moving about the painting is her face.
Like the way she's not looking back.
And I think in Manet's paintings
where the women's eyes rest tell a massive part of the story.
Manet was quite masterful at understanding the psychology of his subjects.
We talk a lot about men painting
women and subjecting them to a gaze.
But I think when Gonzalès doesn't look
back at us and doesn't look back at Manet, she is rejecting that sensibility.
It's kind of a painting about painting a woman as a male artist.
I guess there's a loneliness of being represented without your own agency.
That makes me realise why we have to step
into that space, why we have to make images ourselves.
So I feel like when I look at it, I have mixed feelings.
Eva Gonzalèz being forgotten, dying so young in childbirth.
And her work is not as famous as Manet
and she's an incredible painter.
It kind of is a call to action to reopen
the Pandora's Box of art history
and find the artists that have been excluded.
Find the women that weren't shown
in the salons and in the galleries and the museums, because they do exist.
So I want to see more Eva Gonzalès paintings, I'd say.
I'm Peter Schade.
I'm the head of framing at the National Gallery.
I'm looking at Manet's portrait of Eva Gonzalès.
It's a very strange scene in many ways.
So Eva Gonzalès is painting this flower still life already framed,
which is very unusual for an easel painting to be worked on in a frame.
The frame is a carved and gilded late 18th century frame.
So a frame that's about 100 years old at this moment.
And it's not the type of frame that was
necessarily common for Impressionist painters to refer to.
It's a so-called baguette frame
with fairly standard twisting ribbon pattern and a carved leaf pattern.
And then they also exist with this kind of embroidery at the top
with the kind of elaborate crest and trailing flowers on the sides.
So the frame is perched on an easel held by a blue scarf.
The scarf is partly decoration
but actually is functionally holding the frame at the top of the easel
stopping from falling over.
Because it's actually quite difficult
to hold a fully three- dimensional frame on an easel.
Easels are designed for holding canvases, not for holding three-dimensional frames.
This is not a frivolous or accidental choice.
It's placing the still life very much into the 18th century
but then also the whole scene is transferred -
or at least has got a connection to -
the 18th century and to a time
when flower still lifes were often painted by women.
I think this is trying to place
Eva Gonzalès in the realm of the great 18th century
female artists like Angelica Kauffman.
Vigée Le Brun.
He's clearly connecting Eva
Gonzalès's work to the 18th century
painters with this choice of frame and also with this choice of subject.
It creates an atmosphere, a genre, with deliberation.
Very few painters write about frames or give us their thoughts on frames.
And having a painter select a frame
and paint the frame is something quite exciting, especially in this period.
My name is Hayley Tomlinson and I'm
a paintings conservator at the National Gallery.
So in this painting we have Eva Gonzalès, a young French woman
sat on a chair at an easel, painting a flower painting.
And there's a print and a flower in the bottom right-hand corner.
For an artist trained in the academic French tradition
you'd definitely have started with a lot of preliminary drawings.
And then you'd have transferred
those drawings onto your
prime canvas with charcoal.
So it was very carefully planned.
Quite hard to go wrong, in a way, but not very spontaneous.
Manet thought that things, if they were to be sincere and modern
and fresh and alive, they needed to be spontaneous.
So he wouldn't have preliminary works that he was using, he would literally have
Eva Gonzalès sat in front of him in the studio to copy.
Obviously, nowadays, you can't see
the original sketch, the design on the canvas, it's all covered up with paint.
But because of modern imaging techniques we can visualise it through
XRF fluorescence scanning.
So we can see the image and we can make a map of it.
So when he did the drawing
with this very dilute brown paint, effectively, it was very loose,
very unrestrained, really quite freehand, not very detailed at all.
He was regularly criticised for producing paintings that looked like they'd been
dashed off really quickly.
But the truth was absolutely the reverse.
I think he actually laboured enormously
over his works and regularly
had to rework things.
It was his great ambition when he was
trying to capture somebody's face, he really wanted to get it done in one go.
He thought that was success.
But actually that's very, very hard to do.
Just to try and do that with no planning at all is quite a tall order.
He had the choice either to paint on top
of mistakes or to scrape paint down.
Because he wanted it to look fresh
usually he chose to scrape paint off and start again.
In the case of this portrait, we know that he restarted the face 40 times.
So poor Manet would start in the morning,
I presume, trying to capture this face.
Regularly, in the evening, he'd be there scraping
it all off to start again the next day.
And we know, actually, from the X-ray, we can see, particularly around her nose
these scrape marks where he's used a pallet knife just to take it all off.
In fact, Manet said it was one of his greatest concerns
that his sitters might actually say, 'I just can't do this anymore.'
And in fact, some of his sitters did say, 'No more.'
Eva Gonzalès was clearly very patient.
It is really interesting and quite exciting
when you are able to see something that's been hidden.
So when the scientific team did the XRF
and found the underpainting, which nobody's seen for 150 years
you appreciate his time and labour
and you almost feel slightly sorry for him, really,
that he had this negative reputation.
It wasn't the truth.
I think he went to great pains with his
paintings and that's something that really wasn't appreciated at the time.