The Celebrated American, Mariano Ceballos

Portraitist, muralist, genre and history painter, and printmaker, Goya was a political and social moralist whose art often castigated the repressions of the Spanish monarchy. Following a revolt by liberals in 1820, which reestablished a constitutional government, the absolutist Bourbon king Fernando VII regained power in 1823. In 1824 the disillusioned Goya went into exile in Bordeaux. There he made a set of four large bullfighting scenes, a subject featured in his series of thirty-three etchings and aquatints called Tauromaquia (1816), that constitute a tribute to this popular Spanish pastime. Working in the recently developed medium of lithography, the aged artist, who could barely see, drew entirely from memory, using a crayon directly on the lithographic stones.

This print shows the Argentine matador about to strike a bull with a short sword. Through scraping, Goya blurred the contours of the bull that Ceballos rides, thus intensifying the dynamism of its movement. A similar economy of means defines the spectators, whose forms emerge in a scintillating texture of light and shadow.

-AD