The Spanish culture and visual landscape were exciting to Mary and after Madrid she went further to Seville. Cassatt’s subtlety comes through in her 1873 painting Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla, while her skill with color and detail can be seen in On the Balcony, where two young women flirt with a suitor. Cassatt captures the flowered dresses, bright shawls and coy expressions of the women, while making the male presence less facially detailed yet still dominating as he extends his arm proprietarily. The woman in red seems wistful as the man focuses attention on her companion, and she gazes down at life beyond her railed perch with perhaps a longing to find a truer love.
In the same year’s Offering the Panale to the Bullfighter, Cassatt set up a scene between another woman with a flower in her dark hair giving a bullfighter a panale, or sweet treat. In this painting, Cassatt minimizes the girl while fully showing the bullfighter, his expression just a shade arrogant and expectant. He is, after all, a killer of the bulls (!) and women surely adore him. Cassatt again offers a fine sense of masculine/feminine physical stances, with the bullfighter’s dominant posture and the woman’s more yielding position.
Cassatt’s After the Bullfight could be considered her most intriguing Spanish-influenced painting, mainly because of the artistic statement it makes. In Cassatt’s day, a kind of artistic decorum allowed men to paint nudes, dancers, actresses, or whatever female they happened to be obsessed with — as long as the work kept within the boundaries of what was then considered decency. 19th century women artists, however, generally had to limit their paintings to still-lifes, landscapes, classical or Biblical scenes, portraits of other women, children or animals, with maybe an occasional husband, brother or fatherly study.In Cassatt’s After the Bullfight, a toreador smokes a cigarette and savors his latest triumph. He looks confident both inside the arena and beyond it, yet he is not a romantic caricature. Here Cassatt not only chose a subject equal to the Spanish works of Manet, she asserted her right as a female artist to depict a virile and attractive man.
Cassatt’s knowledge of bullfighters is presumed to not have come from actual attendance but from Théophile Gautier’s 1845 Travels in Spain. Gautier’s guidebook gives extensive and graphic details of the bullfight tradition and the ornate outfits of those involved, noting how the toreador “has no defensive armour, he is dressed as if for a ball…a pin could pierce his satin jacket; all he has is a bit of stuff and a frail sword.” Gautier also notes the crowd’s enjoyment of the sport’s violence and love for the man who either kills or is gored by the enraged and tormented bull.
After her Spanish sojourn, Mary Cassatt returned to Paris. She was eventually invited to exhibit independently with the French Impressionists by Edgar Degas, and she would become close friends with Degas and linked with the Impressionist group throughout the rest of her life.Sources:
