The Influence of the Spanish School on 19th-Century French Painting: The Case of Manet
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 4 min read
Even in the mid-19th century, Parisian artistic education was strictly governed by the precepts of the École des Beaux-Arts.
The prestigious Prix de Rome allowed laureates to study at the Villa Medici in Rome, the seat of the Académie de France on the heights of Mount Pincio; this simply meant that the "Italian manner" of the Renaissance and Greco-Roman Antiquity was the standard of beauty for the French school.
At the beginning of the 19th century, for political and religious reasons, Spanish painting gradually resurfaced and emerged from invisibility: either because painters traveled to Spain and visited the Prado, or because they simply went to the Louvre, where Louis-Philippe had been exhibiting his new Spanish collection since 1838.
Dating from the same era as the canons of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, or Raphael, the manner of the Spaniards was nonetheless very different.
Some saw in it a "school of ugliness and the grotesque" whose influence was to be feared; others, more rare, admired it.
The Irruption of the Hispanic Model
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Spanish pictorial heritage suffered from a deficit of visibility, the Louvre possessing only a tiny handful of works at the time. Louis Viardot confirmed that Spain seemed politically and culturally erased.
The situation shifted with the Napoleonic conflicts and the massive seizures orchestrated by the French military, allowing for the formation of immense Spanish collections in France; people then spoke of a fashion, "espagnolisme."
The inauguration of a space entirely dedicated to these works at the Louvre in the late 1830s, under the aegis of Louis-Philippe, constituted a visual shock for the public and intellectuals of the time.
Critics such as Prosper Mérimée and Théophile Gautier began to write about this school. While the Italian tradition favoured idealised drawing and elevated subjects, the Spanish approach was rooted in an exacerbated naturalism that shocked at first glance. One saw in it a love for the most mundane reality, supported by a mastery of chiaroscuro worked in earth tones.
Subversion Through Technique and the Assimilation of the Ugly
Some saw in this visual frankness a weapon against an academicism entirely devoted to Italian canons.
The philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, or defenders of realism like Champfleury, justified the integration of the "unsightly" into art, believing that classical aesthetics masked material truth.
The artist Gustave Courbet, often accused by his detractors of being a "mannerist of the ugly," illustrated this tendency where dirt and peasant triviality were embraced; the critics would relish it.
However, it was Édouard Manet who integrated the lessons of the masters of the Prado—a museum he visited with fervour—with the greatest radicality. Fascinated by Diego Velázquez, the French artist abandoned conventions of depth to isolate his figures against neutral and atmospheric backgrounds, a process visible in landmark works such as The Fifer and The Tragic Actor.
A manner that had already struck Manet, found in the coarse drapery of The Old Musician, but which refuted in every point the theoretical bases of drapery as defined over several pages by Claude-Henri Watelet. The Academy required that clothing link the characters together and follow the bodies with fluid folds. Manet did exactly the opposite: he froze his models under heavy, static fabrics, creating a sense of total isolation that disconcerted the observer.
Physiological Realism and the Fragmentation of the Work
The impact of Spanish iconography prompted Manet to explore marginal subjects and to paint images of beggars and gypsies.
But this quest for a new realism—one might say "in the Spanish style"—extended even to his religious history painting, with The Dead Christ with Angels, exhibited in 1864.
The writings of Ernest Renan, which questioned the scientific aspect of the resurrection, may have influenced Manet, but the body of Christ—which has all the raw and cadaverous appearance of the bodies exhibited at the new Paris Morgue (one of our blogs is dedicated to it)—is in the spirit of the Spaniards, who were more inclined to treat the non-idealised ugly in a frank manner.
The criticism, notably from Paul de Saint-Victor and Théophile Gautier, was harsh. This livid complexion, smeared with grime, recalling anonymous drowning victims displayed behind the windows of the morgue more than the sanctified Son of God, horrified.
Manet was not, however, insensitive to these criticisms. He cut up two of his canvases: The Gypsies and Episode from a Bullfight, judged geometrically absurd or of an unjustifiable darkness by Edmond About or Léon Lagrange.
The rare fragments preserved, transformed into still lifes or isolated portraits such as The Dead Man, remain today the vestiges of a hesitant painter.
But there is nothing to suggest that he was reconsidering the influence of the Spanish school, for it seems it was his compositions rather than the pictorial treatment itself that caused this decision; the critics likely played no role in these decisions.
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