Mademoiselle V... in costume da espada

Manet painted this in 1862, when all of fashionable Paris was mad for Spain, its bullfights, its guitars, its dark-eyed dancers, though Manet himself had not yet set foot there. So he staged his own version at home. The bullfighter is his favourite model, Victorine Meurent, a young Parisian woman dressed as a male espada, sword in hand, a pink cape in the other. Nothing about it is quite right, and knowingly so. Her shoes would be useless in a real ring, the cape is the wrong colour, and the bull and picador behind her are lifted straight from Goya's bullfighting prints, the Tauromaquia, dropped in at the wrong scale like a painted backdrop. The next year Manet sent it to the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of works the official jury had turned down, alongside the picnic scene that would soon scandalise the city.