Lola de Valence

Lola de Valence was the lead dancer of the touring Camprobi Spanish Ballet company that Manet encountered in Paris in 1862, at the same moment he was absorbing Velázquez and Goya through the Galerie Espagnole at the Louvre. The portrait, executed as a full-length formal study, was Manet's most ambitious engagement with the Spanish craze sweeping Parisian cultural life. Baudelaire wrote a quatrain about the painting, praising Lola as an unexpected beauty 'where pink and black mingle', and Manet inscribed the lines on the canvas — a rare instance of his work inviting explicit literary interpretation.

Manet frames Lola in her performance costume against a stage backdrop glimpsed at the left edge, combining the conventions of formal portraiture with theatrical genre. The bold flat passages of black, white, and red in her dress anticipate his later rejection of academic tonal modelling, and the confident silhouette against the dim stage background recalls Velázquez's full-length royal portraits.