Detail of Mademoiselle V in the Costume of an Espada by Manet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2008

Artist
Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883)

Title
Mademoiselle V. . . in the Costume of an Espada

Date
1862

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
65 x 50 1/4 in. (165.1 x 127.6 cm)

Credit Line
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929

Accession Number
29.100.53

At the infamous Salon des Refusés of 1863, Manet assembled his "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), "Young Man in the Costume of a Majo" (Metropolitan Museum), and the present painting as a triptych.

As many noted, Manet reproduced a scene from Goya's "Tauromaquia" as the backdrop for this painting. He depicted his favorite model, Victorine Meurent (1844–1928), as though she were being photographed in costume for a fancy-dress ball, borrowing her pose from a print by Marcantonio Raimondi after a work by Raphael. X-radiographs reveal an unfinished painting of a nude beneath the surface of the picture. Meurent was a painter herself, exhibiting work in the 1870s and 1880s and at the turn of the century.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/europe...