Dibersión de España (Spanish Entertainment), from: The Bulls of Bordeaux

On 17 November 1825 and two subsequent dates that same year, the French lithographer Cyprien Charles Gaulon registered an edition of one hundred impressions of four prints, each described as 'une course de taureaux'. These were Francisco de Goya's large-scale bullfight scenes, which came to be known as The Bulls of Bordeaux. Almost ten years after the Tauromaquia – Goya was now living in exile in Bordeaux – he once more returned to the theme, this time in the medium of lithography. The technique had been invented in 1798 in Germany as a substitute for letter-press printing and used as a cheaper way of reproducing sheet music. In the following decades, a few lithographic presses had been established in England, France and Spain, mainly for commercial printing purposes. Up to this moment, very few artists had produced significant works in the medium, and no one before Goya had realized the true potential of the technique. It was an enormous liberation: by drawing with a crayon onto the lithographic stone, composing the print and creating the printing matrix had become one single process. No longer was it necessary to use different techniques, such as etching and aquatint in the Tauromaquia, in order to print lines and surfaces. The much younger Spanish artist Antonio Brugada told Goya’s biographer Laurent Matheron how he had seen him working on the Bulls of Bordeaux: ‘The artist worked at his lithographs on his easel, the stone placed like a canvas. He handled his crayons like paint brushes, and never sharpened them. He remained standing, walking backwards and forwards from moment to moment to judge the effect. Usually he covered the whole stone with a uniform, grey tint, and then removed the areas that were to be light with the scraper… The crayon was then brought back into play to reinforce the shadows and accents, or to indicate the figures and give them a sense of movement…’ (quoted in: Mark P. McDonald, Renaissance to Goya – Prints and Drawings from Spain, London, 2012, p. 268) This was probably not quite the way Goya worked; much of the surface of the stone was left clear of tone, but there was plenty of scraping and re-touching, and the whole effect is much rougher and more emphatic, almost caricatural, than his etchings. Nowhere in Goya’s printed oeuvre is his virtuoso draftsmanship so apparent – his ability to create scenes bursting with life, with movement and emotion, out of near-abstract marks of ink on blank paper. Although created while lithography was still in its infancy, The Bulls of Bordeaux, in their immediacy, spontaneity and understanding of the technique, not only surpassed anything that had been made in the medium before, but are often considered the greatest lithographs ever made.
The present sheet is a very rare proof impression of Dibersion de España, pulled before the title and the publisher's name had been added to the stone below the image, and before the printing of the edition. Although lithographs do not 'wear' in the course of a print run in the way copper plates or woodblocks do, this early proof has a freshness and vivacity that sets it apart from impressions of the edition. Perhaps these proofs were intended as presentation pieces and therefore inked and printed with particular care, in order to persuade print sellers to take on the distribution of the series. We do know that Goya sent an impression of Dibersion de España to his friend Joaquín Ferrer in Paris, asking for his help in selling the edition. Ferrer's letter in response is lost, but the artist's subsequent reply indicates that Ferrer was not persuaded and advised him to republish Los Caprichos (see previous lot) instead. It is clear that Goya's great final series of prints was not a commercial success: '... it appears that the banker Jacques Galos, Gaulon's neighbor and Goya's financial manager (whose portrait he painted in 1826), came to possess the entire edition.' (Francisco J. R. Chaparro, in: Mark P. McDonald, Goya's Graphic Imagination, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2021, n. 103, p. 286-7)
In his letter to Ferrer, Goya had referred this subject as a corrida de novillos, an amateur fight with young bulls. It is a chaotic scene with five bulls running about in the ring with numerous human opponents armed only with capes. Undaunted by the trampled body in the center of the ring, the participants grin with amusement. Their broad, humorous faces and stocky bodies also appear in his drawings of the same time, in the so-called Album H. Then in his eightieth year, Goya seems to have had an undiminished appetite for life, and the ability to convey it on stone and paper.