Francisco De Goya (1746-1828) - Bullfighting

Francisco De Goya (1746-1828)

Circulo de Bellas Artes de Madrid.
Note: general condition very good, revise the photos because they are part of the description.


“La Tauromaquia” is a series of thirty-three prints published in 1816. Eleven additional works should be added to this series.
From the first years of the 19th c. Goya had the intention to dedicate a series of prints to bullfighting. He created this collection slowly, with no specific schedule, probably due to the disruption caused by the war.
Francisco de Goya’s iconic print series La Tauromaquia laid the thematic and emotional foundation for how modern Spanish artists, most notably Pablo Picasso, approached the raw spectacle of the bullfight. While Goya captured the intense violence, tragic shadows, and volatile energy of the arena with stark realism, Picasso inherited this fascination, transforming the bull into a deeply personal symbol of both primal force and human suffering. For both masters, the bullring was never merely a popular tradition, but a profound stage to explore life, death, and the turbulent soul of Spain.

While the elite top-20 auction hierarchy features figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Jackson Pollock, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Amedeo Modigliani, Francis Bacon, Banksy, Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, and Edvard Munch, Francisco de Goya remains their essential aesthetic ancestor. Though Goya's rare private market sales peak around $16.4 million—far below these record-breaking nine-figure titans—his revolutionary psychological intensity and expressive brushwork laid the conceptual foundation for modern masters from Picasso to Bacon, making him the intellectual godfather of the market's most coveted creators.