La corrida de toros

In the autumn of 1865 Manet spent about ten days in Spain, and a bullfight in Madrid seems to have shaken him. He called it one of the finest and most terrifying things he had ever seen, and wrote as much to the poet Baudelaire back in Paris. This canvas grew out of the quick notes he made there. It catches the middle act of the fight, the bull dark against bright raked sand, stuck with paper-tipped darts, the matador with a red cloth in one hand and a sword in the other. Manet gives the crowd only as a pale blur in the stands. What he took home from Spain was less the spectacle than the way Spanish painters handled black and open ground, which is all over this small, fast picture.