The taste for all things Spanish that swept France in the 1860s had profound, if misunderstood, effects on modern French and Spanish art. French artists were fascinated by both the perceived exoticism of contemporary Spain as well as the newly popular paragons of its art historical past. The lessons of Velázquez and Goya, in prevailing accounts of modernism, were learned best by avant-garde artists like Édouard Manet (1832–1883), whom a contemporary critic went so far as to call the “Spaniard of Paris.” My dissertation contends, instead, with the other Spaniards of Paris, successful expatriate artists who worked between the French capital, Rome, and Madrid. These artists, led by Mariano Fortuny (1838–1874), considered themselves the rightful interpreters of the Spanish tradition. I argue that Fortuny and his circle shrewdly positioned their work in relation to French ideas about Spanish art, both avant-garde and conservative, as well as Spain’s developing national art historical narratives, even though they often lived beyond their nation’s borders. I demonstrate that these artists, whose seemingly unassuming genre paintings were undergirded by a pronounced but hitherto unexamined nationalism, sought to shape the Spanish art historical tradition; present themselves as its inheritors; and influence the collecting of Spanish art, especially in the United States, in the final third of the nineteenth century.