Spanish lessons by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 03-02-2003 Met exhibit reveals how 19th-century French artists were influenced by Spain's masters "Infanta Margarita" (ca. 1653) "The Balcony" (1868-69) by Edouard Manet. In 1810, a perfumed French gangster named Jean de Dieu Soult arrived in the south of Spain and began committing a series of felonies that changed the course of European art. Soult was a favored marshal in the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. When he swaggered into conquered Seville, he saw his opportunities, as an old Tammany Hall sachem once said, and he took them. The French occupiers went door to door, through churches, convents and private residences, and left with everything they could carry. The stolen goods were ?taken to the old Moorish fortress called the ?Alcazar. Under Marshal Soult's hungry eyes, an inventory was made, ?revealing a total of 999 paintings, including entire ?cycles by Murillo and Zurbaran. Marshal Soult must have known he could not steal them all. But when he returned to France two years later, he did manage to take 173 of the paintings with him, including Murillo's masterful "Immaculate Conception." He installed them in his house in Paris, thus creating the finest private collection of Spanish art outside Spain. That collection (along with the stolen Spanish goods hanging in the new museum in the Louvre) fed the eyes of a number of young French painters, beginning in the 1830s with Eugene Delacroix. The tale is well-told in the fascinating show "Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting," which opens Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the thesis of the exhibition that the arrival of Spanish art in France jolted French artists into modernism. They ?reacted strongly to the painterly richness of the work, but also to the way the work expressed psychological, spiritual or mystical emotions. The sight of the paintings from the Spanish "golden age" propelled French artists into Spain to see more, particularly the masterworks of Spain's greatest painter: Diego Velazquez. Even after the great looting of the Napoleonic era, these were difficult to see in France; the great thief Marshal Soult did not have a Velazquez in his collection. To see his work you had to go to Spain. After the Prado opened in 1819 in ?Madrid, some of the work was easier to find. The man who learned most from the encounter with Velazquez was a dandified city man named Edouard Manet, who traveled to Spain in 1865 when he was 33. "How happy it would have made you to see Velazquez, who all by himself makes the journey worthwhile," Manet wrote to a painter friend. "He is the painter of painters; he didn't surprise me, he ?enchanted me." WARTS AND ALL Velazquez (1599-1660) was a painter with spectacular gifts, high intelligence and great courage. From 1623 until his death, he was the official painter in the court of Philip IV, but he was no cheap flatterer. He looked at his royal subjects with an eye so merciless that today they seem to epitomize the degeneracy of the 17th-century Spanish monarchy, which had lived too long off the loot of Mexico. But Velazquez did not limit himself to the royals. At the Met, his most moving paintings are of more ordinary folk. There's a Velazquez vision of Aesop, his old face weary of the folly of human life, holding a dog-eared book, a forlorn image of aching simplicity. The dwarf Don Diego de Acedo stares at us across the centuries, one huge book open on his lap, another on the floor, held open with a feather in an inkpot, his intelligence and humanity more evident than anything in the faces of the titled fools. Here, too, is the jester, Pablo de Valladolid, a thumb tucked in a kind of apron, dressed in black, his face suffused with decency. He makes no jokes. Here is a vision of the philosopher Democritus, a brown velour cloak wrapped around his black clothing, a hand poised above a globe, books at angles on a table, his face beaming, laughter shimmering under the skin of his face. In Velazquez, the philosophers laugh and the jesters are somber. Velazquez is not the only Spanish painter in the show, neither was he the only one to be scrutinized in the 19th century by the French (and later by American ?artists). Francisco Goya is here, too, ?represented by some familiar paintings, and also by a beautiful still life of fish, a powerful portrait of Gen. Nicolas Guye, various bullfight scenes, etchings from the "Caprichos" series and the "Disasters of War." We even see a Goya etching that ?copied the Aesop of Velazquez. His work reminds us that generals eventually are forgotten, but great art lasts forever. Goya's "Majas on a Balcony" surely must have inspired ?Manet's "The Balcony." Just as surely, Manet borrowed the shallow space of the single-figure Velazquez portraits. The visitor also can see here an earlier version of Manet's imaginary depiction of the execution in Mexico of the Emperor Maximilian. It is rough, sketchy (or brushy), obviously unfinished, but for me it has much greater expressive power than the more famous version. I'm not sure that the exhibition ?absolutely proves its point (I don't see the Spanish influence on Renoir, for example, any more than I hear Billie Holiday in Frank Sinatra). But it is a fresh way to look at these artists, and affords us many sumptuous examples of bravura painting. Two masterpieces by John Singer ?Sargent are also here: "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" (as densely evocative as a great novel) and the famous, or notorious, "Madame X" (Madame Pierre Gautreau). A visitor can savor, too, one of the finest portraits by Thomas Eakins—of the actress Suzanne Santje. Each is worth return visits. But I came away filled with the mastery and humanity of the man Manet called the painter of painters. Long after his death, Diego Velazquez lives. "Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting" is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tuesday-June 8. Originally published on March 2, 2003