죽은 투우사

This calm, isolated figure was once part of a much bigger and much noisier picture. In 1864 Manet sent a large canvas called Incident in a Bullfight to the Paris Salon, and the critics tore into it, above all mocking the odd scale of the bull set against the men. Stung by the ridicule, Manet did something drastic. He took a knife to his own painting and cut it apart, keeping two sections and discarding the rest. This dead bullfighter, laid out flat with his feet toward us, was the lower portion. The upper portion, the toreros and the bull, survives separately as another work now in the Frick Collection in New York. Freed from the crowded scene, the fallen man became something starker, a body alone on bare ground with the pink lining of his cape spilling out beside him. It's now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a fragment that outgrew the picture it was cut from.