The Picador (watercolour painting)
The Picador is an 1832 watercolor painting by Eugène Delacroix, showing the 'tercio de pique' or third phase of a bullfight. It is held in the department of prints and drawings at the Louvre with other drawings of bullfights by the same artist, notably Picador and Chuletillo (lead pencil, 1832).[1]
The work's small dimensions allowed him to compete with the sinister The Bullfights of Bordeaux by Goya.[2] Luigina Rossi-Bortolatto considers that the work's poses draw on the painter's The Battle of Nancy, painted the previous year.[3] The man's simple gesture and the soft colours of the clothes are a major contrast with his paintings such as The Lion Hunt[4]
References
- ^ "Catalogue entry".
- ^ (in French) Alvaro Martinez-Novillo, Le Peintre et la Tauromachie, Paris, Flammarion, 1988 (OCLC 636468048), p 88
- ^ (in French) Luigina Rossi Bortolato, Tout l'œuvre peint de Delacroix, Paris, Flammarion, 1975, 144 p. (OCLC 468796985; republished 1984), page 47
- ^ (in French) Eva Petrová, Delacroix, le dessin romantique, Paris, Cercle d'Art, 1990 (ISBN 2-7022-0245-4), p 73
