Chaussons de danse

Manet had a fascination with Spanish culture and art, in particular the work of Diego Velázquez, whose influence is felt in his earliest paintings. All things Spanish were very much on the minds of French artists, writers and musicians from the mid-19th century onwards, the result of the imperial ascendancy of Napoleon, who invaded Spain and set up his brother, Joseph, as king in 1808. The plundering of Spanish monasteries and palaces soon followed, resulting in the seizure and removal of hundreds of paintings. Following Napoleon's downfall, many of these works were restituted back to Spain to form the core of the new Museo del Prado in Madrid. With increasing knowledge of Spanish art came a growing taste for it, largely supplanting the supreme favor the French had traditionally accorded to Italian painting. The Prado became an obligatory stop for all cultural travelers to Spain.
Political turmoil in Spain during the mid-1830s and an inability to enforce the export ban on Spanish art allowed the French king Louis-Philippe, an ardent Hispanophile, to buy many Spanish artworks for his Galerie Espagnole in Paris. Following Louis-Philippe's death in exile in 1850, the contents of his museum were sold at auction in London, further dispersing fine Spanish paintings throughout the capitals of Europe. For the relatively brief time it was in existence, the Galerie Espagnole attracted painters such as Jean-François Millet, Théodore Chassériau, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet, who adapted the fundamental tenets of Spanish realism to their work. Manet was only fifteen when the Galerie Espagnole closed its doors, but there were now ample opportunities to study Spanish painting in French museums.
Manet’s 1862 painting, Le ballet espagnol (fig. 1) is a demonstration of the artist’s love of Spanish culture; the romantic stereotypes depicted reflect the exotic allure of Spain that permeated his environment. Here, Manet paints a troupe of Spanish dancers from the Royal Theater of Madrid, headed by the veteran and principal dancer Don Mariano Camprubi, who had first excited Paris audiences in 1834 dancing the bolero. The troupe performed at the Paris Hippodrome from August to November 1862, and during this period Manet arranged for several of the principal dancers to pose for him at the studio of his friend, Alfred Stevens.
The present work, painted in 1879, borrows from Le ballet espagnol. The legs of the two central figures, Camprubi and Anita Montez, are replicated, while the bouquet in the foreground of that painting has here been reduced to a single rose. Manet reversed the stance of the male dancer and angled the position of both figures to conform to the round format of the tambourine on which it is painted. Manet executed a total of seven tambourines with Spanish subjects. The tambourine itself is evocative of Spanish tradition, and the work as a whole therefore functions as an emblem of the artist’s fascination with the Spanish manner. Manet donated this work to a benefit auction held on December 18, 1879 for flood victims in the small town of Murcia in southeastern Spain.

“While we were looking at Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ at the Granoff Gallery in Paris in 1956, we saw this painting done on parchment which had supposedly been the top of a tambourine…We bought it and the Monet ‘Water Lilies’ at the same time.” —David Rockefeller