Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1825. 300x412 mm; 11 3/4x16 1/4 inches, wide margins. Edition of 100. Printed by Gaulon, Bordeaux. From The Bulls of Bordeaux. Ex-collection Marcel Louis Guérin (Lugt 1872b, lower left recto). A brilliant, richly-inked impression of this extremely scarce, important lithograph, with all the details and subtle tonal qualities distinct and with strong contrasts between the black ink and the cream paper.
We have found only 3 other impressions at auction in the past 30 years. According to Harris, the four subjects which comprise Goya's late-career, masterpiece lithographic series The Bulls of Bordeaux, "Are very well printed and very rich in quality."
Goya spent the end of his life, 1824-28, in self-exile in Bordeaux, leaving Madrid to escape a climate of political unrest and conflict in his later years. During his first summer in France, he traveled to Paris to visit the Salon which had opened on August 25th. He may have come in contact with some of the artists represented in that memorable exhibition: Eugène Delacroix (see lot 235) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, but also Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet (1792–1845) and Horace Vernet (1789–1863) among them, all of whom early on had espoused the new medium of lithography and could likely have introduced Goya to the printer Cyprien Gaulon. The then 79-year-old Goya, ever experimental and doubtlessly sensing a new market for lithographs in Paris especially, focused on this nascent medium during his final years, creating these bravado images of bullfighting scenes drawn from the bullrings of Bordeaux. Delteil 288; Harris 285.
