Interpretive Resource

As a young woman, American-born Mary Cassatt refused to allow the limited opportunities open to female art students in her native land to curtail her decision to become a professional painter. Upon completing a five-year curriculum at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, in 1865, Cassatt took advantage of the superior training and extensive art collections in Europe, making two ambitious study tours. In 1874, at the end of her second trip, she settled permanently in Paris. Earlier in that second sojourn, in October 1872, she fulfilled a long-standing desire to visit Spain. She traveled alone, spending her first three weeks in Madrid, where she visited the Museo del Prado to examine and copy paintings by Bartolomé Estéban Murillo and Diego Velázquez. Her next destination was Seville; there, she set up a studio and, in the course of the next five months, produced a distinctive group of works on Spanish themes, including After the Bullfight. Cassatt’s choice of subject reflects an ongoing fascination in Europe and North America with Spanish culture that began with the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1808 and that culminated with the staging of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen in 1875. There is no evidence to suggest that Cassatt actually attended a bullfight. Her torero is in fact a posed model, but she depicted him with all the glamor and swagger of a romantic figure, perhaps inspired by the descriptions of matadors in Théophile Gautier’s popular 1845 travel guide to Spain. While the vigorous handling, bold palette, and deft rendering of detail reveal Cassatt’s indebtedness to the work of Velázquez, her realistic approach suggests her awareness of Edouard Manet’s treatment of similar subjects in the 1860s.