The Infanta Marguerita (Infante Marguerite)

Édouard Manet after Diego Velázquez

Etching

National Gallery of Art

This 1861 etching by Édouard Manet is a print made after a seventeenth-century portrait of Infanta Margarita Teresa (1651–1673), daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, whose image was famously rendered by Diego Velázquez in multiple royal portraits. Manet, a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism, was deeply influenced by Spanish Golden Age painting and produced this work during the early 1860s—his most active period in printmaking—translating Velázquez's composition into a bold system of etched lines with densely hatched background and sparse, sinewy strokes defining the Infanta's elaborate court dress. The print belongs to a broader moment of French fascination with Spanish masters, during which both Manet and his contemporary Edgar Degas made etchings after Velázquez's Infanta portraits, reflecting the significant cultural shift from Idealism toward Realism in mid-nineteenth-century French art. Now held in the Rosenwald Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this work is catalogued in Jean C. Harris's definitive catalogue raisonné of Manet's graphic works (Harris 1970, no. 14).