斗牛

In the late summer of 1865 Manet went to Spain and saw a bullfight, and it shook him. He wrote to the poet Baudelaire that a corrida was one of the most beautiful and most terrible things a man could see, and that he meant to put its glare and its drama on canvas back in Paris. This is the result, worked up in his studio the next year from sketches and from Goya's bullfighting prints, which he owned. A bull and the small figures of the fighters stand out against the raked sand of the ring, the crowd banked up behind. The critics savaged it, and Manet kept it in his studio, unsold, for years. He knew the arena only from that one journey south.