斗牛

In the spring of 1864 Manet sent a large canvas called Incident in a Bullfight to the Paris Salon, and the critics tore it apart. One mocked its fallen matador as a toreador of wood killed by a horned rat. The perspective did look strange, the dead figure oddly flat against the sand. Manet seems to have agreed with at least some of the attack, because once the picture came home he took a knife to it and cut it into separate paintings. This is one of the surviving pieces, the far end of the ring with the bull and the massed crowd. The lower fragment, the dead bullfighter lying alone, is now in Washington. He even reworked this section afterward, adding the bull's head once the canvas had been divided.