The corrida

Description of the artwork

Painted in 1856, our picture depicts the drama of bullfighting, whose tragedy did not escape Henri Frédéric Schopin's brush.
Here, the artist calls on his mastery of historical painting to share with us this fatal moment in the arena. The scene most likely takes place in Catalonia, whose colors adorn the emblems around the dressing rooms of the dignitaries present.

During the 19th century, part of the fascination of bullfighting was due to the art of a few famous toreros, and until the beginning of the 21st century, the “toreo de legos” predominated. Faced with the power, aggressiveness and temperament of fast, muscular beasts with sharp horns, there was no question of playing statue or “composing the figure”. Man must rely on his footwork to dodge the bull's repeated assaults. Bullfighting is above all a combat, with emotion as its main attraction. Picadors remain indispensable auxiliaries. The test of the spades, sometimes repeated five, six or seven times, and costing the lives of several horses, is the only way to reduce the animal's strength and speed.

This is the moment the history painter chooses to depict. All the movement is concentrated in the foreground, and while the bull has already knocked one of the picadors to the ground, he is now goring the horse in the center of the composition. Frightened and suffering the assault, the stallion gives us a look of pain. The painter employs the full range of his technique to depict the main scene in great detail, while the background seems to melt into a haze of dust and sand. His sense of narrative is mastered, and he succeeds in making us vibrate to the rhythm of the tragedy of the moment.

Mostly depicted by Spanish painters such as Francisco de Goya in the early 19th century, bullfighting was also the subject of magnificent paintings by Édouard Manet from 1865 onwards, and of course a recurring theme in the work of Pablo Picasso.