Rejection and Resolution

Eduoard Manet, The Bullfight, 1863. Oil on Canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

The Salon recognized his ignorance of the bullfight. In the Salon of 1864, he entered the Incident at the Bullfight. The painting was not only rejected, but highly criticized for not looking like a convincing bullfight. He then cut the work into two, creating The Bullfight and The Dead Toreador (Hoenigswald). Even inside a bullfight ring the bullfight looks more like a theater production than a depiction of an authentic Spanish tradition. The rigidly posed bullfighters in The Bullfight (1864) magnify the problem of staged bullfighting in Manet’s works. The characters hold typical bullfight poses, but there is no significant fear or contact with the bull. Specifically, in The Dead Toreador (1864), the dead figure lies flat on his back in a dark setting. Displacing the figure from the bullring all together makes his death unrelated to the bull. The cold, prone pose of the dead toreador does not physically connect with the trauma caused by the bullfight. Instead it highlights the inauthentic acting of the arbitrary toreador actor. The failure of the intended works of the once Incident at the Bullfight demonstrate Manet’s unconvincing portrayal of bullfighting due to his dependence on previous Spanish works by Velazquez and Goya and 19th century travel literature. He had to change in order to impress audiences.

Eduoard Manet, Dead Toreador, 1863-1864. Oil on Canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

After his Salon works were criticized profusely in 1864 and 1865, Manet searched for help. Attacking his Spanish works, an art critic, Theophile Thore, argued that Manet was “unoriginal” and designed “pastiches” of Velazquez, Goya and El Greco rather than authentic renditions of bullfighting scenes (Hyslop 207). The hurt Manet begged for advice from Baudelaire who answered him frankly by noting that his demand was “really stupid” (qtd. in Hyslop 221). Baudelaire pointed out that many great artists were “scoffed at” and that he should learn to deal with criticism. And so Manet did. Instead of sulking in Paris after the Salon of 1865, he made a trip to Spain in late summer for a couple of weeks. Though art historians like Juliet Wilson-Bareau believe that “his primary reason for going there was to see a great many authentic works by Velazquez” (Manet by Himself 234), Manet's letters and works after his trip reflect his true desire to experience an authentic Spanish bullfight. If he could experience a bullfight, he could express his own observations rather than relying on the interpretations of travel accounts and old masters in his depiction of this respect of Spanish culture.