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Lot Essay
This drawing was the fifty-third page in the so-called 'Album G', the first Bordeaux Album, the penultimate of eight albums that Goya filled with drawings from 1796, at the age of 50, until his death in 1828. Eleanor Sayre, who first defined and described these albums, described how 'Goya in his fifties [...] evolved a singular use for drawings albums. They were not notebooks containing a casual assembly of portrait heads, drapery studies and composition sketches. Neither were they any longer sketchbooks preserving the intermittent record of places he saw and picturesque figures which might be used again. They had been transmuted by him into journals - drawn not written - whose pictorial entries of varying length pertained to what Goya thought rather than what he saw' (quoted in J. Wilson-Bareau, Goya, drawings from his private albums, exhib. cat., London, Hayward Gallery, 2001, p. 12). The sequence of albums charts Goya's development. In the Sanlucar album he is for the most part at leisure on the estate of the Duchess of Alba near Cadiz, but as the years pass the drawings show the influences that washed over the artist, knowledge of English caricature prints, of the whimsical drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, his relationships with reformers such as Jovellanos and Saavedra, and the impact of the French invasion and the Restoration. These influences gave rise to the great series of etchings and aquatints for which Goya is celebrated, but they can be seen first in his 'journal-albums'.
The Butterfly Bull is from one of two albums that Goya seems to have used concurrently from about 1825, following his arrival in Bordeaux in September 1824. The subjects of these albums are varied, including scenes of madness and despair and satirical subjects but also some French themes. They might have been the basis of an unrealised set of new Caprichos mentioned in a letter to Joaquín María Ferrer in December 1825. As Juliet Wilson-Bareau writes 'in the late album drawings [...] the thoughts, ideas and feelings of a lifetime take form in a final series of works' (J. Wilson-Bareau, op. cit., p. 19).
The Butterfly Bull himself, like so-many of the drawings in Goya's private albums, is open to several interpretations. The previous drawing in the album, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, apparently shows a pit full of disembodied heads, perhaps a reference to the victims of the guillotine. In this scene these heads have sprouted butterfly wings and float through the air carrying a charging bull, perhaps mimicking the balloons sold by vendors at bullfights (the fiesta en el ayre of the inscription).
The Butterfly Bull is from one of two albums that Goya seems to have used concurrently from about 1825, following his arrival in Bordeaux in September 1824. The subjects of these albums are varied, including scenes of madness and despair and satirical subjects but also some French themes. They might have been the basis of an unrealised set of new Caprichos mentioned in a letter to Joaquín María Ferrer in December 1825. As Juliet Wilson-Bareau writes 'in the late album drawings [...] the thoughts, ideas and feelings of a lifetime take form in a final series of works' (J. Wilson-Bareau, op. cit., p. 19).
The Butterfly Bull himself, like so-many of the drawings in Goya's private albums, is open to several interpretations. The previous drawing in the album, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, apparently shows a pit full of disembodied heads, perhaps a reference to the victims of the guillotine. In this scene these heads have sprouted butterfly wings and float through the air carrying a charging bull, perhaps mimicking the balloons sold by vendors at bullfights (the fiesta en el ayre of the inscription).