After the Cock Fight

After the Cock Fight from around 1880 introduces a more robust masculine subject into Monticelli's usual vocabulary of garden pleasures and elegantly dressed figures. Cock-fighting was both a popular entertainment and a subject with a long history in European genre painting, allowing artists to depict crowds, excitement, and competitive tension. Monticelli's version would have transformed this earthy subject through his characteristic handling, dissolving the crowd scene into masses of rich colour rather than depicting individual reactions with psychological precision. By this late date in his career his technical approach was fully formed, and his panel surfaces had acquired the jewel-like density that fascinated Van Gogh when he encountered Monticelli's work in Paris in the mid-1880s. The Walker Art Gallery's holding of this panel alongside other Monticelli works reflects the sustained British appetite for his distinctive vision of animated, colour-saturated scenes.

The panel surface shows Monticelli's mature technique: a dark ground over which colour is built in successive applications, with the darkest passages remaining translucent while highlights are thickly impastoed. Figures in a crowd dissolve into a mosaic of individually coloured marks.