The Matador Saluting

In 1865 Manet finally made the trip to Spain he had put off for years, and it remade him. He had loved 17th-century Spanish painting from reproductions, but standing in front of Velazquez in Madrid was another thing entirely. He also went to the bullfights and watched the celebrated matador Cayetano Sanz. Back in Paris he painted this full-length figure, the first of several, with the flat lighting and dark, economical palette he took straight from Velazquez. The Paris Salon refused it in 1866, so Manet built his own pavilion beside the 1867 world's fair and hung it with 20 other Spanish subjects. It reached New York decades later on the advice of the painter Mary Cassatt.