Le Matador saluant

A matador stands tall, hat raised toward a crowd we cannot see. Is he accepting applause, or asking permission? Manet's brother posed, and the question has never quite been settled.

The story behind the painting

Édouard Manet painted The Matador Saluting between 1866 and 1867; its exact date is unclear, and Charles S. Moffett traces the first definite reference to an 1867 exhibition of Manet's works at the pavillon de l'Alma. Wikidata gives 1866. The biographers Étienne Moreau-Nélaton and Adolphe Tabarant agree that the model was the painter's brother Eugène. The work was among those refused by the Paris Salon of 1866. The prefect then allowed Manet to show the rejected pictures in his own studio, on the curious condition that he not open the studio doors too wide.

What to look for

The canvas is large, about 171 by 113 cm, and it was Manet's first large-format work. A single standing figure in a matador's costume fills it, a man with brown hair and sideburns caught in a gesture of greeting. Moffett argues that the picture shows what Manet drew from the compositions and palette of Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán. Unlike his earlier fantasy Miss V Dressed as a Bullfighter, this painting came after Manet's trip to Spain in 1865, and it carries his admiration for the country and its art.

Meaning and intent

What exactly is happening? The usual reading is that the matador is receiving the crowd's applause after killing a bull. But Théodore Duret, the painting's first buyer, argued instead that the matador is asking the crowd's permission to kill the bull. The image itself does not decide between the two, and that ambiguity is part of its charge: a quiet moment of ceremony set inside a violent spectacle that stays entirely outside the frame. What we are given is the man, his bearing and his salute.

Legacy

Louisine Havemeyer hesitated before buying the work from Duret, worried its size would not suit her husband. Mary Cassatt reassured her that it was exactly the format Manet wanted, and she bought it. Henry Osborne Havemeyer then became passionate about large works and also acquired Young Man Dressed as a Majo, another painting from Manet's Spanish period. Both were left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1929, where Miss V Dressed as a Bullfighter also hangs, so the three Spanish subjects can be seen together.