Subject
The widespread interest in Spanish culture amongst bourgeois Parisians at the end of the 1850s was multi-faceted but always filtered through French commentary and interpretation. The collection of historical Spanish paintings assembled by king Louis-Philippe at the Louvre between 1838 and 1848 fed into modern Realist painting practices, while the influence of representative ‘popular’ Spanish performance is already well-known due to Édouard Manet's exploration of contemporary celebrities such as Lola de Valence and his series of full-length paintings of models dressed in broadly ‘Spanish’ costumes. Unlike Manet's famous painting Spanish Singer (1860) Bonvin's etching eschews obvious costume references in preference for a more earnest conception similar to Edgar Degas' painting of the Catalan guitarist Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste de Gas (1870-71).
