L'Espagnole

Painted in 1870 and now held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes, L'Espagnole reflects Carolus-Duran's deep personal and artistic connection to Spain, where he had traveled and absorbed the influence of Velázquez and Ribera that would define his mature style. A Spanish woman as subject — the dark mantilla, the particular quality of Iberian light, the specific physiognomy associated with southern European femininity — had been a standard of French orientalist and genre painting since at least Manet's Victorine Meurent in Spanish costume, and Carolus-Duran's version belongs to this tradition while reflecting his firsthand knowledge of Spain rather than the armchair exoticism that some of his contemporaries practiced. Valenciennes's museum, in the northern French city that was also the birthplace of Watteau, holds this work as a significant example of the Spanish influence on French nineteenth-century painting. The year 1870 was a year of catastrophic disruption for France — the Franco-Prussian War began in July and ended in the siege of Paris — and the painting's Spanish subject represents Carolus-Duran working in a vein of visual pleasure at a moment of national trauma.

The portrait is a showcase for the Velázquez-derived handling that Carolus-Duran had absorbed during his Spanish travels: broad, confident brushwork that achieves the impression of complete description with an economy of means that rewards close examination. The Spanish costume — mantilla, dark dress — provided a tonal framework within which the face could shine with particular warmth. The handling of black fabric against skin was a technical test that Velázquez had mastered and that Carolus-Duran set himself to replicate.