The Famous American, Mariano Ceballos

Artist Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746–1828)

Date1825

Mediumlithograph on cream wove paper

Dimensionsimage: 31.2 × 40.7 cm (12 5/16 × 16 in.)
sheet: 47 × 62.4 cm (18 1/2 × 24 9/16 in.)

ClassificationsPrints

Credit LineMrs. Kingsmill Marrs Collection

Terms

Object number1926.682

DescriptionNo. 1 from Los Toros de Bordeos
Label TextPortraitist, 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.ProvenanceBy 1893, John J. Peoli [1825-1893], New York, NY. By 1926, Laura Norcross Marrs [1845-1926], Boston, MA; 1926, by bequest to the Worcester Art Museum.

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