Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting

This illustrated book accompanies a groundbreaking exhibition - the first of such scale and depth to be organized around this subject - that traces the roots of Modernism in mid-nineteenth-century French Realism. In 1804, at the dawn of the French Empire, there were no more than a handful of Spanish paintings in public collections in France. During the course of the nineteenth century, however, French collectors and museums assembled substantial holdings of works by such Spanish masters as El Greco, Zurbaran, Velazquez, Murillo, and Goya, while French writers and artists - among them Hugo and Baudelaire, Gericault, Delacroix, Millet, Courbet, Degas, and especially Manet - came to understand, appreciate, and even emulate Spanish painting of the Golden Age. Here approximately two hundred works by French and Spanish artists chart the development of this cultural influence and map a fascinating shift in the paradigm of painting, from Idealism to Realism, from Italy to Spain, from Renaissance to Baroque. Above all, these images demonstrate how direct contact with Spanish painting fired the imagination of nineteenth-century French artists and brought about the triumph of Realism in the 1860s, and with it a foundation for modern art.