About this work
locks the viewer into one of the most charged instants in the corrida. The scene captures the final moments of the stage of the bullfight known as the *suerte de varas* — the pike-men's pass, where mounted picadors goad and weaken the bull before the killing phase begins. The background is barely sketched in with light, watery brushstrokes that denote the walls of the bullring and a mass of spectators, while the figures in the foreground — bullfighters and mounted picadors — are depicted with thick, colourful brushstrokes, creating a vivid contrast.
The horned beast stands still, apparently with no intention of attacking, while the picador, mounted on a badly injured horse, tries to provoke him with his lance. Another horse lies wounded on the sand, and the blurred outline of yet another lies abandoned further away.
Thick black strokes of paint suggest tension and movement, while dark shadows and a faceless crowd in the background lend an ominous air to this emotional confrontation.
In 1824, Goya was exiled from Spain to Bordeaux, France, where he lived for four years before his death in 1828. It was there that he painted this work, gifting it to his friend Joaquín María Ferrer — with an inscription on the back reading "Pintado en Paris en Julio de 1824."
Painted late in his career when he had begun experimenting with different techniques, Goya showed remarkable freedom, using a heavily loaded brush, a palette knife, a rag, and even his fingers to apply paint to the canvas.
Goya portrayed the animals as the real victims of the festival that so fascinated him — a moral complexity running just beneath the surface of what might otherwise read as spectacle. One scholar writes that Goya "capitalizes on bullfighting as a symbol of resistance to the dominant order, of a popular Spain battling tyrannical control" — a reading that gives this arena scene a political weight that goes far beyond sport.
Now held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, this oil on canvas measures approximately 49.8 × 70.8 cm — intimate in scale, but enormous in atmosphere. As a fine art print, it commands rooms that can hold its psychological intensity: a study, a library, a darkly lit hallway where its sandy ochres and sooty blacks have space to breathe. It speaks to viewers drawn to art that refuses easy resolution — those who look for the human condition in unexpected places and understand that even a scene of popular entertainment can carry the full weight of history.
