[2][3] In 1865, at age sixteen, Eva Gonzalès began her professional training and art lessons in drawing from the society portraitist Charles Chaplin.

[4] Through her father's connections as a founding president of the Société des gens de lettres, she met a variety of members of the Parisian cultural elite, and from a young age was exposed to the new ideas surrounding art and literature at the time.

In Portrait of Eva Gonzalès, Manet depicts her working at an easel, yet her stiff posture and expensive dress are clearly unfit for creating artwork.

This depiction of her likely caused some critics to perceive her simply as a young, decorative model who was working with an older established male painter.

This can be seen in works such as Enfant de Troupe (1870), which is a nod to Manet's Le Fifre (1866), while many of her later paintings involved portraits of her sister, Jeanne.

[3] The couple had a son named Jean Raimond in April 1883, shortly before receiving news of the death of Manet.

Today, one of Eva Gonzalès' most notable works is A Loge in the Théàtre des Italiens (1874; Musée d'Orsay, Paris) which is "described as one of the most provocative paintings of its day..."[11] In 1883, Gonzalès died in childbirth at the age of thirty-four,[2] five days after the death of her teacher, Edouard Manet,[12] which left her son to be raised by his father and her sister, Jeanne, who later became Guerard's second wife.

Some other accomplishments that she has had throughout her career, include the newspaper L'Art purchasing her pastels and receiving recognition in England, Belgium, and France.