Key facts
Nanny and Child is an oil on canvas painted in 1877–1878 by Eva Gonzalès, the only pupil formally acknowledged by Édouard Manet and a figure long associated with Impressionism despite never joining the group’s exhibitions. Painted in Dieppe, the work shows a nanny seated by a garden gate, distractedly watching over a little girl. Shown at the 1878 Salon under the title Miss et bébé, it stands as a personal response to Manet’s The Railway, from which it borrows the composition while opening up the space around the figures. Held today at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, it is considered one of the finest achievements of an artist whose brief career was cut short by her death in 1883.
With an Impressionist touch, without quite being one, here is Eva Gonzalès. I truly discover this artist while browsing the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and I’m immediately won over by her talent as a painter. She knows how to capture this stolen moment of a nanny watching over a little girl in the park: one plays, the other perhaps dreams, her gaze somewhere far off. I’m struck by Gonzalès’s ability to convey this autumnal atmosphere through color and light alone, no fallen leaves or grey sky needed to feel the season. The parasol left on the ground, almost forgotten, speaks on its own of the absence of strong sun; everything is at rest here, and that quiet stillness comes through even in the brushwork, more settled than lively. It’s the kind of painting you slow down in front of without quite knowing why.
A parasol lies overturned on the garden ground. Its turquoise lining catches the light; its parchment-colored exterior blends into the bare earth. In 1877, Eva Gonzalès sets up her easel in front of a gate covered in ivy.
A touch inherited from Manet, a space that breaks free of him
The brushwork is broad and sensuous, forms laid down without excess detail. Here Gonzalès borrows the vocabulary of her teacher, Édouard Manet: sharp contrasts of light and shadow, a muted palette, black accents. But one detail intrigues. The nanny sits at the very center of the canvas, yet nothing indicates what she is actually sitting on. Her pale pink dress entirely conceals the seat; only a touch of pale paint near her elbow hints at an armrest. She seems almost to float in the frame of the gate.
A quiet dialogue with The Railway
Gonzalès did not invent this scene from nothing. The National Gallery of Art presents it as a discreet homage to Manet’s The Railway (1873), held in the same collection: the same interplay between a seated figure looking out at the viewer and a child turned toward the railing. Where Manet confines his figures behind black ironwork and a shallow foreground, Gonzalès opens the space out toward the garden. Shown at the 1878 Salon under the title Miss et bébé, a nod to the English nationality, then a mark of prestige, of nannies employed by high society, the painting met with a mixed reception: critic Eugène Véron praised the little girl but judged the nanny poorly modeled, while Castagnary admired the liveliness of the brushwork.
Eva Gonzalès
The only pupil ever formally acknowledged by Édouard Manet, Eva Gonzalès exhibited solely at the Salon, never with the Impressionist group. She died in 1883 from complications of childbirth, just six days after her mentor.
News: a first retrospective for Eva Gonzalès at the Petit Palais
Long overshadowed by Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès has been the subject, since September 15, 2026, of her very first major retrospective, on view at the Petit Palais in Paris until January 24, 2027, under the title “Eva Gonzalès. Parcours d’une artiste libre.” Nearly 100 works, paintings, pastels and prints, trace the artist’s chronological journey. The exhibition, co-organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it will travel in February 2027, does not include Nanny and Child (held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington), but it offers valuable context for rediscovering the full body of work of this painter, Manet’s only pupil.
Source: Petit Palais
A question for you
She paints like the Impressionists, yet never exhibited with them. Was she really an Impressionist?
About this work
- Nanny and Child
- Eva Gonzalès
- 1877–1878
- Oil on canvas
- 65 × 81.4 cm
- National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
- https://www.nga.gov/artworks/135512-nanny-and-child
