Sale 2460 - Old Master Through Modern Prints, November 2, 2017

214 c FRANCISCO JOSÉ DE GOYA Picador Caught by a Bull . Lithograph, 1825. 330x415 mm; 13 1 / 8 x16 1 / 2 inches, full margins. Ex-collection Marcel Louis Guérin (Lugt 1872b, lower left recto; his sale Paris, December 9, 1921); and M. Knoedler & Co., New York, with the original label from the former frame back. A superb, dark, richly-inked impression of this exceedingly scarce lithograph. We have found only 2 other impressions at auction in the past 30 years. According to Harris, this lithograph is likely a first experiment by Goya for Los Toros de Burdeos (The Bulls of Bordeaux) series, a group of 4 different lithograph bullfight subjects, printed by Cyprien Gaulon at Bordeaux in an edition of 100. Goya spent the end of his life, 1824-28, in self-exile in Bordeaux, leaving Madrid to escape a climate of political unrest and conf lict 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 216) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (see lot 216A), 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 Gaulon. The then 79-year-old Goya, ever experi­ mental and doubtlessly sensing a newmarket for lithographs in Paris especially, focused on this nascent mediumduring his final years, creating these bravado images of bullfighting scenes drawn from the bullrings of Bordeaux. Delteil 287; Harris 284. [80,000/120,000]