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Spanish Cavaliers
Edouard Manet French
Not on view
This is an early example of Manet’s method of combining art-historical sources with his own invention. He based the figures in this small canvas on those he copied from The Gathering of Gentlemen (1645–50), a painting in the Louvre believed at the time to be by Velázquez. He likewise borrowed the compositional device of the open door in the background from the Spanish painter’s famous Las Meninas (1656), at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, which he knew through reproduction and finally visited in 1865. Manet’s godson, Léon Leenhoff, likely modeled for the boy in the foreground, whose pose closely resembles that of the figure in Boy with a Sword, on view in the next gallery.
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