The Bulls of Bordeaux (D. 286-289; H. 283-286)

Almost ten years after the Tauromaquia – Goya was now nearly eighty years old and living in exile in Bordeaux – he once more turned to the subject of the bullfight. In 1825 he created a set of four large-scale bullfight scenes, The Bulls of Bordeaux, this time in the medium of lithography. The technique had been invented in 1798 in Germany as a substitute for letter-press printing and used as a cheaper way of reproducing sheet music. In the following decades, a few lithographic presses had been established in England, France and Spain, mainly for commercial printing purposes (for a notable exception see lot 113). Up to this moment, very few artists had produced significant works in the medium, and no one before Goya had recognized the true potential of the technique. It was an enormous liberation: by drawing with a crayon onto the lithographic stone, composing the print and creating the printing matrix had become one single process. No longer was it necessary to use different techniques, such as etching and aquatint in the Tauromaquia, in order to print lines and surfaces. The much younger Spanish artist Antonio Brugada told Goya’s biographer Laurent Matheron how he had seen him working on the Bulls of Bordeaux:

‘The artist worked at his lithographs on his easel, the stone placed like a canvas. He handled his crayons like paint brushes, and never sharpened them. He remained standing, walking backwards and forwards from moment to moment to judge the effect. Usually he covered the whole stone with a uniform, grey tint, and then removed the areas that were to be light with the scraper… The crayon was then brought back into play to reinforce the shadows and accents, or to indicate the figures and give them a sense of movement…’ (quoted in: Mark P. McDonald, Renaissance to Goya – Prints and Drawings from Spain, London 2012, p. 268)

This was probably not quite the way Goya worked - much of the surface of the stone was left clear of tone, but there was plenty of scraping and re-touching, and the whole effect is much rougher and more emphatic, almost caricatural, than his etchings. Nowhere in Goya’s printed oeuvre is his virtuoso draughtsmanship so apparent – his ability to create scenes bursting with life, with movement and emotion, out of near-abstract marks of ink on blank paper. Although created while lithography was still in its infancy, The Bulls of Bordeaux, in their immediacy, spontaneity and understanding of the technique, not only surpassed anything that had been made in the medium before, but are often considered the greatest lithographs ever made.