Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting

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.