Mary Cassatt arrived in Spain, traveling alone, in early October 1872; she was twenty-eight years old. She had already completed an art curriculum at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; studied in Paris with the fashionable and influential painter-educator Jean-Léon Gérôme; and traveled widely in Italy, settling in Parma, where she copied frescoes by Correggio. Eager to absorb more lessons from the Old Masters, Cassatt left Italy for Spain, specifically to see the works of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Diego Velázquez. At the Museo del Prado in Madrid, she copied Velázquez’s Don Baltasar Carlos, and also The Spinners. The latter work, she wrote to a friend, was the most realistic picture she had seen, noting, "good heavens, why you can walk into the picture."

After three weeks in Madrid, Cassatt moved on to Seville, where she arrived on October 26. She was armed with Théo-phile Gautier’s popular 1845 travel guide to Spain, which describes at length the various figures and costumes associated with the bullfight. In the two paintings of bullfighters Cassatt executed in Seville, her treatment closely followed Gautier’s description of their costume, a short jacket of orange, green, blue, or red velvet, embroidered with sequins and gold, adorned with silver filigree ornament, and left open in the front. Bullfighters wore a jabot, or shirt with a ruffle down the front, a loose, colorful, narrow tie, a silk belt, and leather pants. Typically tall and athletic, they carried a vivid, red silk cape hung over a horizontally held baton, used both to attract and to agitate the bull.

Though infused with the realism of Velázquez, After the Bullfight, not unlike Gautier’s small book, initially seems a skilled traveler’s search for the exotic and the picturesque. The painting also, however, reveals an unexpectedly modern sensibility in its vigorous brushwork, and in the relaxed, seemingly unposed quality of the sitter. Cassatt was very likely familiar with the Spanish paintings of France’s leading avant-garde painter, Édouard Manet, from her studies in Paris in 1866–67. Manet himself had visited Spain in 1865 and continued to draw upon Spanish themes long after his return to the French capital. His Matador Saluting (1866; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) was exhibited in 1867, along with at least fourteen other pictures exploring Spanish subjects in a major exhibition held at the Avenue d’Alma in Paris. Like Gautier and Manet, and to some degree like her former teacher Gérôme, who also turned frequently to Spanish subjects for his popular Salon paintings, Cassatt saw both the aesthetic and commercial possibilities of this choice. She declared: "I see the immense capital that can be drawn from Spain, it has not been ‘exploited’ yet as it might be, and it is suggestive of pictures on all sides."

The modernity of Cassatt’s After the Bullfight is best understood in the context of two other paintings she executed in Seville. The Flirtation: A Balcony in Seville (1872; Philadelphia Museum of Art) was first exhibited with this title in 1873. The narrative implied by the title emphasizes a potentially romantic relationship between the demure woman on the right who gazes over her shoulder and the man leaning forward out of the shadowy background. In a second painting, Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter, Cassatt represented another pair engaged in a flirtation. Here the woman offers water to a bullfighter in which to plunge his panal, or honeycomb, for sweet refreshment. The Art Institute’s After the Bullfight may well have been conceived as a conceptual pendant to the second picture, since together they suggest a tale of imminent seduction and its somewhat amusing aftermath: in the Chicago picture, the woman has disappeared, the torero has now draped the red silk scarf loosely over a wooden support, and casually lights a cigarette. In her Spanish pictures, Cassatt revealed a sensuality and wit that have been largely overlooked. Her subtle investigation of gender relations in Seville magnificently captures the romantic allure of a foreign culture. Having reconciled her admiration for the Old Masters with a more daring technical style, Cassatt approached the contemporaneity and ironic distance of Manet’s finest canvases. She returned to Paris in March 1873, and within a few years met Edgar Degas and joined the French Impressionist circle.