An exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay traces the profound influence of Velázquez, Goya and the other Spanish masters on the painting of France's greatest artists, writes Lara Marlowe from Paris
Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix personified the conflicting pulls of Classicism and Romanticism in early 19th-century art. For Ingres and the conservative establishment, Raphaël was the ultimate reference. But Delacroix, influenced by his friendship with a former French ambassador to Madrid - and the paintings he brought back - looked to Spain, copying the work of his contemporary, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), and studying 17th-century Spanish masterpieces.
After the Napoleonic wars, the French briefly hung looted 17th-century paintings by Ribera, Murillo and Zurbarán in the Louvre, but they had to give them back after the 1814 Congress of Vienna. A couple of decades later, some of the same canvases were among 400 purchased by King Louis Philippe for his "Spanish Gallery" in the Louvre. That lasted from 1838 until 1848. After Louis Philippe was overthrown, the Spanish works were auctioned in London.
Now, fine works of Spain's "golden century" have been gathered again in Paris, in Manet/Velázquez: The Spanish Manner in the 19th Century, at the Musée d'Orsay. The exhibition shows the profound influence of 17th-century Spain on French cultural life 200 years later.
French painters mimicked the realism of their Spanish predecessors, taking beggars, buffoons, cripples and martyrs as subjects. Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet and others adopted a Spanish palette of ochre, grey, brown, black and chalky white.
Like the Spaniards, they gave precedence to light and shadow, quick brushstrokes and colour, over draftsmanship and exactness.
The Spanish craze extended to fashion, literature, dance and music. As shown in Henri Regnault's 1869 portrait of the Countess of Barck, French ladies wore black lace mantillas and held fans. Prosper Mérimée wrote Carmen in 1846, which inspired Georges Bizet's opera 29 years later.
The 17th-century painters who were the main source of inspiration comprise the first part of the exhibition. Francisco de Zurbarán's dramatic painting of Saint Francis hung in King Louis Philippe's gallery, where it inspired Manet and Camille Corot. Today it belongs to the National Gallery in London, which loaned the canvas for the Manet/Velázquez show.
The 19th-century art historian, Charles Blanc, described how frivolous visitors to the Louvre would fall silent when they found themselves before Zurbarán's monk, with his frayed brown cassock and a skull clutched to his body. The painting still exudes ascetic spirituality.
Goya served as a link between the 17th and 19th centuries, by engraving his own copies of Velázquez's portraits, widely published from the late 18th century. His painting of a flirtatious young woman and her parasol-bearing servant, The Young (or The Letter), from around 1812-1814, is on loan from the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille. Behind the two women with the cavorting Pekinese dog, Goya painted a strange background of laundry women working. The same labourers can be found in later Degas and Caillebotte paintings.
French Hispanophiles revered the 17th century so much that many neglected Goya, the artistic heir of Velázquez. Delacroix was an exception, as shown in his poignant Young Orphan in the Cemetery (1824).
Goya's paintings of tragic contemporary events have the immediacy of news photography. His graphic painting of the French execution of Spanish rioters in Tres de Mayo (painted in 1814) would inspire Manet's Execution of the Emperor Maximilian in 1867. Goya's Cannibals Contemplating Human Remains, on loan from Besancon, is as gruesome as a modern horror film.
The Spanish influence is most marked in the work of Édouard Manet (1832-1883), whose paintings comprise one-third of the exhibition. Manet and Degas are believed to have met in the Louvre, when both were copying the Portrait of the Infante Marguerite, attributed to Velázquez.
Long before his first journey to Spain in 1865, Manet imitated the Spanish style from engravings and reproductions, with mixed results. He purchased a collection of Spanish costumes and accessories from a Paris tailor and painted The Spanish Singer (wearing espadrilles and playing a guitar) in 1860. Two years later, Manet's favourite model, Victorine Meurent, looked ridiculous disguised as a bullfighter. The more successful Boy with a Sword, painted in 1860-61, was inspired by a group portrait of 13 men attributed to Velázquez, which Manet also copied. Émile Zola, the novelist who stood by Manet when the French Salon shunned him, said Boy with a Sword definitively established Manet's affiliation with the Spanish masters. On loan from the Metropolitan, it is the signature painting of the exhibition.
Manet's grasp of things Spanish improved with a stay in Spain in 1865. The bullfights he painted, in bright sunshine with teeming crowds in the background, were "one of the most beautiful, strangest and terrible scenes you could imagine", he wrote. Manet's praise for Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), whose work he studied in the Prado, was boundless. "He is the greatest painter there ever was," Manet wrote to Baudelaire in the same year. "I saw between 30 and 40 of his canvases in Madrid . . . all of them masterpieces. He surpasses his own reputation and he alone is worth the fatigue and difficulties that are impossible to avoid on a journey to Spain."
Thereafter, Manet's work was permeated with Spanish allusions. His Tragic Actor took the same stance, with the same shadows falling behind his legs, as Velázquez's The Buffoon Pablo de Valladolid. Manet's three figures on a balcony repeat the theme of Majas on a Balcony from the school of Goya. Manet's Philosopher, Beggar (both on loan from the Art Institute in Chicago) and Artist (on loan from Sao Paulo) are his most powerful studies in human psychology. They were inspired by two Velázquez portraits of philosophers in the Prado.
Zola wrote in 1866 that his favourite painting of the period was Manet's Fife Player. Like most of Manet's work, it was rejected by the Salon. The boy's round, dark eyes, the black, red, ochre and grey colours, convey a Spanish feeling. But although the plain background and full-length standing portrait hark back to Velázquez, The Fife Player is the most modern painting in the exhibition, a precursor to the work of another great Spaniard, Pablo Picasso.
Manet/Velázquez: The Spanish Manner in the 19th Century is at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, until January 5th.