The Bullfight

The Bullfight, painted in 1864 and in the Hispanic Society of America in New York, belongs to the mature phase of Eugenio Lucas Velázquez's taurine oeuvre. By 1864 he had been painting corrida scenes for nearly two decades, refining his approach to the arena's distinctive compositional problems: the circular space, the vast crowd, the concentrated violence at the centre, and the theatrical contrast between the sand of the arena floor and the dark mass of the stands. His 1864 bullfighting canvases show a painter fully in command of these challenges, able to evoke the noise and smell of the corrida through purely visual means. The Hispanic Society of America's collection of his work—including this and the other 1864 Hispanic Society canvas—allows direct comparison of his handling of different taurine moments within the same year and collecting context.

A mature Lucas Velázquez bullfighting composition would deploy his most assured techniques: a high viewpoint that reveals the full arena floor, rapid brushwork in the crowd stands that suggests thousands of spectators through a disciplined shorthand of marks, and a tighter, more deliberate touch reserved for the central drama of bull, matador, and cape.