Carnival Scene

Carnival Scene, painted in 1864 and now in the Hispanic Society of America in New York, brings Eugenio Lucas Velázquez to a subject he shared with Goya: the carnivalesque excess of the days before Lent, when social hierarchies were temporarily suspended under the cover of masks and costume. Goya's Burial of the Sardine—which depicts the rowdy funeral procession that traditionally marked the end of Carnival—was one of the most celebrated images of Spanish popular life, and Lucas Velázquez's engagement with carnival subjects is inevitably measured against that precedent. Mid-nineteenth-century carnival in Madrid and other Spanish cities retained the traditional elements: masquerade, street dancing, satirical floats, and a general atmosphere of licence and inversion. Lucas Velázquez approaches this subject with the same Goyaesque mixture of comedy and darkness that marks his most personal works.

Carnival scenes invite chromatic freedom: masked and costumed figures provide a kaleidoscopic array of colour against night-time streets or interior ballrooms. Lucas Velázquez's habitually dark tonality is relieved in such subjects by the artificial light of torches or ballroom chandeliers, creating a flickering, unstable atmosphere.