Victims of the Fiesta

Victims of the Fiesta, painted in 1923 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a major late treatment of the bullfight theme that Zuloaga had explored since at least 1910's The Victim of the Fiesta at the Hispanic Society. This larger, more elaborate composition may depict multiple figures — human and animal — in the aftermath of the corrida, expanding the earlier single-horse motif into a more comprehensive statement about the violence embedded in Spanish ritual spectacle. The Metropolitan Museum holds several significant Zuloaga works from the 1920s, when American collectors were purchasing his paintings at their peak prices. Zuloaga's repeated return to this subject across his career suggests its personal importance: as a Basque-born painter of Spanish national life, the corrida occupied a charged position — it was simultaneously a Spanish identity symbol and, for many northern Spaniards and European observers, an emblem of what was seen as Spain's backwardness. His treatment maintains the ambiguity without resolution.

The larger format of this 1923 version allows for a more complex compositional organization than the 1910 single-figure work. The fallen or stricken horses provide the central motif, their white and grey forms catching light against the arena's dusty ground. Human figures — matadors, handlers — may provide scale and narrative context around the central animal subjects.