Quixote, Don, 1961
Bronze
30 5/8 X 10 5/8 X 23 1/8 IN. (77/8 X 26.9 X 58.7 CM.)
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966
Smithsonian - Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Provenance
Jh Purchased From Matisse Gallery, Pierre, New York 1963

Don Quixote (Spanish: Don Quijote (help·info), fully titled El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha ("The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha") is an early novel written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Cervantes created a fictional origin for the story based upon a manuscript by the invented Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli.
Published in two volumes a decade apart, Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age and perhaps the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears at the top of lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

Different ages have tended to read different things into the novel. When it was first published, it was usually interpreted as a comic novel. After the French Revolution it was popular in part due to its central ethic that individuals can be right while society is quite wrong and seen as disenchanting—not comic at all. In the 19th century it was seen as a social commentary, but no one could easily tell "whose side Cervantes was on." By the 20th century it had come to occupy a canonical space as one of the foundations of modern literature.
The novel was recently voted The Greatest Book of All Time by the Nobel Institute.

The novel is also responsible for the adjective quixotic, which alludes to behavior that is noble in an absurd way, or the desire to perform acts of chivalry in a radically impractical manner.
(Wikipedia)