Spanish Cavaliers

Spanish Cavaliers (Cavaliers espagnols) is an 1859 oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet en 1859, now in the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon.

As in his Scene in a Spanish Studio,[1] the work reuses elements from Manet's copy of Little Cavaliers, such as its two figures[2] - at that time that work was attributed to Diego Velázquez by the Louvre's curators.[3] He also takes the open door from Velázquez's Las Meninas. The child in the right foreground is the 7 or 8 year old Léon Koëlla-Leenhoff - he also appeared in Manet's similarly Spanish-influenced Boy Carrying a Sword.[4]

It was first exhibited as work 6 in the autumn Salon of 1905. Manet's family sold the work directly to the art collector Cheramy.[5] It was later bought by Raymond Tripier, a Lyon doctor who left it to its present owner in 1917. The Wildenstein catalogues also mention the art dealer Paul Guillaume as one of the work's other owners, though this is unlikely since Guillaume was only born in 1891.[6] It toured to the musée Cantini in Marseille in 1961 as work 27[2] · .[7]