Horsewoman, Fullface

Equestrian portraiture had long been the preserve of royalty and generals, but Manet's Horsewoman, Fullface, now at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, treats the subject in a specifically modern key. The woman rider depicted belongs to the bourgeois leisure culture of the Bois de Boulogne — fashionable Parisians on horseback, not military commanders on campaign. By 1882 the practice of equestrianism as a leisure activity and social display had become thoroughly bourgeois, and Manet, who chronicled modern Parisian life with unflinching precision, found in the frontal view of the mounted figure a compositional challenge as much as a social observation.

The frontal presentation of horse and rider is unusual in equestrian portraiture and creates compositional challenges Manet solves by focusing attention on the rider's face while allowing the horse's body to function almost as a landscape element behind. The handling of the horse's coat and the rider's habit shows his characteristic use of flat, broad strokes.