Hispagnolisme

Hispagnolisme (French: espagnolisme) is the French passion for Spanish culture that swept art and society in the nineteenth century. It surfaced in the eighteenth century - Fragonard painted Spanish costume - and gained force from Napoleon's Peninsular War campaigns, but took off after the 1830s, when Spanish subjects became fashionable in Paris. Painters looked to Velázquez and Ribera: Théodule Ribot's tenebrist kitchen and street scenes, and Manet, whose Spanish-derived Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and majo portraits made his name. Mérimée's novella Carmen fed Bizet's opera, and the craze reached Britain through Sargent. It outlasted the century: Picasso financed his first Paris stays with bullfight and Spanish peasant pictures. Hispagnolisme is a taste rather than a school - but it taught French painting a new sobriety of subject and colour.

Defining characteristics

• Spanish low-life and picturesque subjects: bullfights, taverns, majo and maja costume, blind musicians, beggars
• Ribera- and Zurbarán-style tenebrism: near-black grounds with sharply lit figures
• Velázquez-influenced loose, silvery-grey brushwork and sober, reduced palettes
• Black garments, lace mantillas, fans and guitars staged as Spanish 'signs' in portraiture and genre scenes
• Everyday Spanish subjects rendered with realist gravity rather than exotic comedy
• Warm earth tones broken by sudden red or white accents

Key figures

• Théodule Ribot (1823-1891) — French realist whose tenebrist kitchen and Lazarillo scenes modelled Spanish Golden Age painting
• Édouard Manet (1832-1883) — Absorbed Velázquez and Spanish subjects in the paintings that made his name
• Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) — Writer whose novella Carmen (1845) fed the French appetite for Spanish themes
• Georges Bizet (1838-1875) — Composer of Carmen (1875), the craze's musical high point
• John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) — Carried hispagnolisme to Britain with Spanish dance subjects such as El Jaleo

Example works

• Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe — Édouard Manet (1863)
• Lazarillo de Tormes and His Blind Master — Théodule Ribot (c. 1870-1880)
• El Jaleo — John Singer Sargent (1882)

Sources

• Hispagnolisme - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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