89 EDOUARD MANET The composition is reminiscent of the painting Episode in a Bullfight, which Manet French, 1832­1883 exhibited at the Salon of 1864 and then cut up following adverse criticism; the lower Bullfight section, The Dead Toreador, is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Watercolor and bodycolor upper, Toreadors in Action, which strongly recalls the upper part of this drawing, is in over graphite the Frick Collection, New York. 19.3 x 21.4 cm (7 9/16 x 8 7/16 in.) 94.GC.100 In August 1865 Manet travelled to Spain, a visit that was profoundly to influence the rest of his career. In a letter that September to a friend he mentioned a "superb" bullfight he had witnessed: "You can count on it that upon my return to Paris I shall put the fleeting aspect of such a gathering of people onto canvas." He also wrote of the "dramatic part, with picador and horse upended and gored by the bull's horns and a horde of ruffians trying to control the furious beast." Manet's picture of the subject (Paris, Musee d'Orsay) was painted in the same year, though it differs considerably from the drawing in its wider angle of vision, which allows more space for the artist's interest in the crowd but diminishes the dramatic focus on the bull savaging the picador's horse. Manet was one of the most prodigiously gifted painters of all time, his brushwork remarkable for its naturalness and fluency. His liking for popular subject matter (at the time construed as offensive) established him in the forefront of avant­garde painting of the day. Beginning with The Absinthe Drinker (Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek), rejected by the Salon jury in 1859, and culminating in the Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia of 1863 (both Paris, Musee d'Orsay), his work was widely acclaimed as the "painting of modern life," for which the eminent nineteenth­century critic Charles Baudelaire had so long appealed. Although he refused to take part in the Impressionist exhibitions of the 1870s, Manet nevertheless influenced most of the members of the group. 108 FRENCH SCHOOL