Stierkampf, Suerte de Varas

Goya painted this in 1824, the year he left Spain for good. He was 78, stone deaf, and worn down by a repressive turn under the restored king Ferdinand, so he took himself into exile in France and settled near Bordeaux. From there, an old man in a foreign country, he kept painting the bullring of home. The scene shows the suerte de varas, the stage of the fight where a mounted picador drives his lance into the bull. Wounded animals lie in the sand and the crowd behind is a faceless dark smear. What startles is how it is made: Goya had stopped bothering with fine brushwork and laid the paint on with a knife, a rag, even his fingers, so the whole thing has the roughness of something remembered rather than watched. He would die in Bordeaux four years later.